FA Begs for Hardware to Ameliorate Sloppy Code

[SlowFag]

What a totally and completely unexpected turn of events.

Greetings, all!

We're looking to improve site performance, enhance speed and increase uptime by adding redundant systems to the site. To do that, we need to upgrade our server hardware (which is somewhat ancient, with most of our gear dating back from 2007-2008). And we'd like to ask your help. Rather than directly ask for money, we'd like to ask those of you out there who can spare it to help chip in with the hardware itself. New hard drives, processors and servers can go a long way.

Hardware List: http://www.amazon.com/registry/wish.....rlist_go_o_C-1

Want to help out? Just buy items from our Amazon wishlist (linked above), and you can send the drives right to us during checkout! Easy as that! Be sure to put your name on the invoice so we can give you credit.

We understand that the items on the page are expensive, but server gear is expensive. We plan on investing $5-6K of our own funding into the new hardware, but are asking for you help with the rest. We're willing to make some trades to compensate. Buy a processor, and we'll toss in free advertising for a year. Buy a server chassis, and we'll give free advertising for life and guaranteed Dealer's Space at FAU. If you'd like to try to work something out directly please note me (Fender) and we'll get back to you.

For those looking to donate cash we CAN take donations via check or money order, though we'd prefer the hardware if possible. Otherwise, you have the option of helping out with Amazon gift cards we can use to purchase the hardware as well. That said, again, we understand the costs of the parts involved. It's expensive.

http://donations.furaffinity.net/

FA's been around for 8 years, and the site continues to grow on a daily basis. Help us grow even further!

Thanks,
The FA Team

[a pigeon]

It's not even half of the final list for what we still need to buy on our side.

^
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/4383428#cid:32088938

Many of the responses so far doesn't seem to be very positive. a selection:

Im just going to laugh because there is nothing wrong with the server, more the actual coding of the website is done so inefficiently that it requires a high powered server to handle it.
I was expecting a new UI by January/Feb and we are at the end of febuary and once again like all the other times...nothing seems to be appearing.

If this site falls through, the last thing I'll do is donate to it to ensure it's shitty system stays up and running. Let's be realistic.

Will this help fix the shitty coding as well?

I can understand the costs of upgrades, but for a site like this, I have my doubts as to why these upgrades are even needed right now. IMO, focus should be given to site performance software wise and if that isn't enough, then focus on hardware. Software updating typically costs less than a dime and just requires a few hours of focus and analysis on the overall system itself. Hardware migrations and updates should be considered a last resort, not an instinctive decision.

For some people FA has been a good site to them but i happen to be one of many that FA has not been kind to and wouldn't care to donate to this site even if it was going down the toilet.

how is new hardware gonna help a site that is still ancient when compared to its competitors? 

that new furry and those 399 alternative accounts people sign up for because folder support still hasn't been rolled out must be a real burden.

I understand that good hardware is part of successfully running a site of this size but I do have to wonder if the hardware issues aren't partially due to the way it is abused daily by how overly inflated the system is. I would love to see how much the overheads come down if the new site ever appears.

why pay for a site that can hardly maintain itself staff wise and user base wise. Cause I sure don't want to spend my money which could go towards my bills and crap for a site that can't even do it's listed proper functions not to mention someone who doesn't do what they are supposed to do.

I wish you didn't support the things you do.

The new FA admins are flailing about. This was one of them explaining why other websites manage to run better than FA:

Other sites had the benefit of an arbitrary number of years of technology advancing. What you can buy today versus what you could buy 5 years ago for the same price is not fully comparable.

^
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/4383428#cid:32090137

"We're working on it":

I don't know the details because I'm not involved in the project, however I can say for certain that the new UI is well underway and has been for a while.
Likewise for other requests and such, several features are being developed by the tech team. But at the same time they are working on sorting out the issues you get while running a major website, as well as a whole bunch of other stuff that they have to do.

^
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/4383428#cid:32089534

from what I have seen and heard etc etc, regardless on what they have or haven't done in the past, 'neer etc is fixing things up and trying to get things as good as he can now. Regardless of whats been done in the past, that's what he is trying to do now.

^
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/4383428#cid:32089846

You'd think new admins were deliberately chosen to be ones who hadn't been on the site long so that they wouldn't know FAs history.

[ColonThree]

So compared to the cost of all this hardware - and future hardware - roughly how much would it cost to hire someone competent to redo FA/finish off and update Ferrox/magic option 3? Aside from the obvious answer of "Free" for making use of all the people that have offered their help.

[Fate]

Princess Piche doesn't seem to understand exactly how much goodwill FA has burned.

[RedFlowerJigglypuff]

I think one of the more mystifying things about this is that they are asking for donations in the form of Amazon gift cards. You mean to tell me that they don't have someone with a paypal account or something similar to take in these donations? Seems really unprofessional. Give them more money so they can continue to fall sort of promises and standards time and time again. Business as usual on FA.

[magus]

I think one of the more mystifying things about this is that they are asking for donations in the form of Amazon gift cards. You mean to tell me that they don't have someone with a paypal account or something similar to take in these donations? Seems really unprofessional.

Boy, is that a funny story. And it's FA, of COURSE it's unprofessional. Though, didn't they have some skeevy paypal-for-porn for donations a while back?

[RedFlowerJigglypuff]

Boy, is that a funny story. And it's FA, of COURSE it's unprofessional. Though, didn't they have some skeevy paypal-for-porn for donations a while back?

Thing is, Inkbunny manages to have Paypal and Alertpay support, despite all the reasons FA claimed for loosing the support that Inkbunny still has. (cub porn in particular)  So. It boggles the hell outta me.

[winserv03fan]

Good GOD, someone bought them a $1,200 server chassis. AND A SECOND...
https://twitter.com/Dragoneer/status/306840412503552000

[Conan]

The database server is probably due for replacement (and yes, they need to have redundant database servers), but they're doing that thing they do where they become gamers over systems administrators and just want to get whatever specs they can as high as they go. 64GB of 1600MHz RAM!!! 750W PSUs!!! 8 drive bays!!! I think they had something like a 40GB database, so there really could go with much less. Also, their chosen RAM is incompatible with the CPU.
 
That said, the graphs show that PHP is the thing pulling down the response time, with it slowly getting worse since the last major outage. I don't know how new database servers are going to help this.

Edit: Wondering what on earth they need 3TB drives for. The database is nowhere close to filling a quarter of that.

[SlowFag]

We might've totally ignored your advice about hardware before, but we know what we're doing this time, so we're going to ignore your advice about fixing our code issues and continue to buy hardware.

We're not asking for money. We're primarily asking for people to donate hardware so we can upgrade our base services. Yes, I agree that we could have/should have spent the money differently 5 years ago, but a lot changes in five years, and we've learned a lot of lessons since. That said, argument aside, we've not had massive hardware failures since. We did buy quality gear, and it has lasted.

But server hardware does NOT last forever and we do need to work towards keeping the backbone of the site solid.

You're free to disagree. We could have invested better originally, but we are working on a much smaller budget, and doing things the right way now.

[ColonThree]

I think they had something like a 40GB database

That's just the cache I think. As of September 2012:
<yak[away]> there's only 350GB of data, but hundreds of billions of rows. mostly notifications related

Edit: Wondering what on earth they need 3TB drives for. The database is nowhere close to filling a quarter of that.

I assumed that these were for the DB, and the 3TB drives were for storing submissions.

[greaseyote]

there's only 350GB of data, but hundreds of billions of rows. mostly notifications related

And how many accounts are there that haven't cleared notifications in years because they're inactive or banned or whatever.

It's like a hoarder complaining that he needs a bigger house to store several decades of old newspapers, and every day the paper boy brings more... when what he really needs to do is cancel the subscription.

[Rattoyagi]

there's only 350GB of data, but hundreds of billions of rows. mostly notifications related

And how many accounts are there that haven't cleared notifications in years because they're inactive or banned or whatever.

It's like a hoarder complaining that he needs a bigger house to store several decades of old newspapers, and every day the paper boy brings more... when what he really needs to do is cancel the subscription.

I never thought of this. This makes a lot of sense O.O

[Conan]

there's only 350GB of data, but hundreds of billions of rows. mostly notifications related

And how many accounts are there that haven't cleared notifications in years because they're inactive or banned or whatever.

It's like a hoarder complaining that he needs a bigger house to store several decades of old newspapers, and every day the paper boy brings more... when what he really needs to do is cancel the subscription.

I never thought of this. This makes a lot of sense O.O

I've brought this up before and the staff never had a response, and other people would come up with bullshit excuses why clearing old notifications was a bad idea. "What if someone went into the military and got deployed for a year when they came back wanted to check their new submissions?!?!?!?1one"

[Ketsuban]

It's of course fun to brainstorm ways to deal with that "problem". The one that just popped into my head was: add a way for the user to flag their account as inactive when they know they'll be absent for a prolonged period and don't want their account to disappear. Inactive accounts are exempt from the twice-a-year sweep which culls any accounts that haven't done anything since the last sweep and clears everyone's submissions.

To prevent abuse of the system: inactive accounts can't upload, post comments, etc.; setting an account inactive requires two weeks' notice during which time the account isn't actually flagged inactive, but is subject to the restrictions; and the culls are random - there's one in every six-month block, but they don't happen at regular six-month intervals (at most you know that there's always at least two months between culls).

[Conan]

It's of course fun to brainstorm ways to deal with that "problem". The one that just popped into my head was: add a way for the user to flag their account as inactive when they know they'll be absent for a prolonged period and don't want their account to disappear. Inactive accounts are exempt from the twice-a-year sweep which culls any accounts that haven't done anything since the last sweep and clears everyone's submissions.

To prevent abuse of the system: inactive accounts can't upload, post comments, etc.; setting an account inactive requires two weeks' notice during which time the account isn't actually flagged inactive, but is subject to the restrictions; and the culls are random - there's one in every six-month block, but they don't happen at regular six-month intervals (at most you know that there's always at least two months between culls).

The easiest way to do it is to just daily delete notices that are more than 365 days old. 99.99% of people do not need to have notices over a year old. It doesn't even require changing the site code, just a cron job that executes a MySQL command.

[winserv03fan]

http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/4389184
"6X Western Digital Red (3TB)"
I just have to ask. WHAT are you going to do with 18 TERABYTES OF DISK SPACE???

I would put down money that a couple of these hard drives will "disappear" eventually.

[ProvincialTwit]

Especially since the 'Red' drives are specifically for NAS systems.  Probably yet another example of BIGGER NUMBERS = BETTER! without understanding the underlying principles behind said numbers.

[ColonThree]

"6X Western Digital Red (3TB)"
I just have to ask. WHAT are you going to do with 18 TERABYTES OF DISK SPACE???

Put in a RAID, presumably. I couldn't find anything about the file server, but as for the DB

<yak[away]> ... this replacement hardware can't keep up with the write pressure. figures, 4x7.2k drives in raid10 is a major step down from 6x 10k ones. ...

I'm sure he'll like having 6x15k drives to play with then.

Especially since the 'Red' drives are specifically for NAS systems.  Probably yet another example of BIGGER NUMBERS = BETTER! without understanding the underlying principles behind said numbers.

The blurb for the drives seems to make a big deal out of how wonderful they are for RAIDs too. Maybe there's something more appropriate they could buy, but if furries are going to throw their money at FA, I guess there isn't much reason for them to care too much. It's 3TB and it uses loads of enterprisey words; what more could you want?

[ProvincialTwit]

A part of me keeps wanting to contact them and try to give them some sound, sane infrastructure and systems advice.

Then they do shit like this that reminds me what incredibly awful and reprehensible human beings they are and I find myself unable to give a shit.