Genealogy Chat

Tried to edit a post I had made over on Find Ancestors Board.

It kept appearing on screen and then vanishing with all threads missing and just grey back ground which only left the info down the left hand side of the screen

Gave up in the end and had to post another reply.

Maureen I did'nt have any trouble earlier on when we were working on that thread together but I had oh comeback in.

Have never had a blank page but plenty of Error pages.

Thanks Mel

Seems to be working okay for the time being so fingers crossed.

I did ask in the office last week why such things happen - another is the error message. Was told it is not so much quirks in the program as overload of activity on the server.

That's something I do understand.

:-( :-( :-(

The frequency of these errors does rather imply that there is insufficient server capacity.

Yes it manages for most people most of the time but can't cope with a slight overload when dealing with large threads, or members who use the system extensively.

Perhaps they could allow longer timeouts for recognised helpers.

The basic problem is that they are using Microsoft IIS 7 Server and SQL; nearly all major public sites use Apache on Linux.

IIS 7 is essentially targeted at corporate intranets where internal websites have a melange of web pages, MS office documents, OneNote and so on. Within the corporate net it is fairly easy to to manage server load. Bright Solid's major corporate business is Microsoft based and they don't have much Apache capability despite GRU making extensive use of Ajax.

Unfortunately IIS7 has various weaknesses which hackers are forever probing and some of these relate to page management. MS have issued updates for some of these weaknesses but the fallout has been tighter timeout times...

The downside for users of GRU are likely to be time-out based errors in the following scenarios:

(a) a query returning a lot of data
(b) a user accessing the server from a long distance eg Canada NZ or Australia
(c) slow speed connection e.g. USB GSM stick

The errors are a mostly a result of the server configuration rather than the site code. I don't think there is much prospect of much being done about these errors as the age old rule of bang for buck comes into play.

Published traffic figures for the site do not suggest lack of server capacity overall.

Wow Rollo I guess that answers the question :-D Do you want to say again in English :-S ;-)

RolloTheRed, just knew you would pipe up with full tech answer in logical sequence.
Ta for that.

If I'd tried to explain it would have taken me all day and it still wouldn't have come out so articulately written.

Rollo's comment "bang for buck " does sum it up though. Or, put another way, the old 80-20 or probably more like 95-5 rule.

95% plus members using the site don't have a problem, 5% or less do. So the conundrum it how much do we spend on the 5% when it might be better spent on the 95%?

Got a problem with that answer IGP

Probably 95% of the members seldom use this site. So out of the remaining 5% there are probably less than quarter a percent who are helpers on the boards - meaning doing lookups etc.

But that depends on how many active members there actually are - those that pay currently for their membership

Membership numbers are over 13 million now.

This site only works because of the help given by a member to other members regardless of which board that is on. From doing lookups to offering support to a member when they have a problem..

If GR do not spend on the few then they will lose them.

GAL another abreviation I don't understand.

RolloTheRed, I was looking for a possible tracking of the servers usage - is it in the public domain.
:-D :-D :-D

I would imagine it means

Get a Life

J