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#1 2020-06-22 11:24:20

gaekwad
Server grease monkey
From: People's Republic of Cornwall
Registered: 2005-11-19
Posts: 4,296
GitHub

Forum backup schedule changes

I’ve tweaked the schedule for the forum database daily backup. It was causing occasional timeout issues for people accessing the site from 0545UTC to 0555UTC, so I’ve moved it to an earlier time slot where there’s a more defined dead zone in the logs.

Technicals: we have hourly and daily backups of the forum database. The hourly schedule takes a .gz backup, and the daily schedule takes a .xz backup. The daily schedule takes much longer to complete, due to the nature of its compression (I am investigating ways of speeding it up with more RAM etc).

A raw (uncompressed) database export is ~268MB. A .gz backup is ~72MB. A .xz backup is ~49MB.

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#2 2020-06-23 05:01:15

colak
Admin
From: Cyprus
Registered: 2004-11-20
Posts: 9,101
Website GitHub Mastodon Twitter

Re: Forum backup schedule changes

gaekwad wrote #323905:

I’ve tweaked the schedule for the forum database daily backup. It was causing occasional timeout issues for people accessing the site from 0545UTC to 0555UTC, so I’ve moved it to an earlier time slot where there’s a more defined dead zone in the logs.

Thanks Pete,
I normally have some issues at around 6-6:30am UK time so and i’ll report back here if they appear again.


Yiannis
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#3 2020-06-23 06:52:36

phiw13
Plugin Author
From: Japan
Registered: 2004-02-27
Posts: 3,248
Website

Re: Forum backup schedule changes

gaekwad wrote #323905:

[…] from 0545UTC to 0555UTC […]

If my math is correct, that matches about the time when I sometimes see load issue(s), as in not connecting or not loading. Hmm, 5:45AM UTC + 9 = ? Yeah, I think that is correct.

Having that scheduled back up and hour earlier would fall at the tail end of lunch time here, so that is probably OK. Might even be a tad earlier, but then it is possible the night owls on the western Pacific shores are still around.

Thanks for all to time you play with this.


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#4 2020-06-23 11:12:28

gaekwad
Server grease monkey
From: People's Republic of Cornwall
Registered: 2005-11-19
Posts: 4,296
GitHub

Re: Forum backup schedule changes

phiw13 wrote #323920:

Having that scheduled back up and hour earlier would fall at the tail end of lunch time here, so that is probably OK. Might even be a tad earlier, but then it is possible the night owls on the western Pacific shores are still around.

It’s a bit of a crap shoot as to find the ‘best’ time for the backups – the .gz hourly ones take literally a few seconds so it’s not noticeable, but the .xz ones for cold storage take some minutes. I will be trying some experiments with limiting the CPU, allotting more RAM, etc in the coming weeks, but for now a simple time shift might alleviate some of the snags.

Longer term thinking involves splitting out single server into multiple smaller ones – benefits include better resiliency and reduced single point of failure (although we have backups and build scripts to rebuild quickly should something break).

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