Server Upgrade Saturday December 20

Today and tomorrow (December 19 & 20) I will be conducting a major upgrade to our server. Most of the changes to the site will be below the surface, but there might be periodic brief outages during the process.

Our organization has been steadily growing and unfortunately we have outgrown our current server. For example, we no longer have enough disk space to perform our regular backups of the tmswiki.org account on our server. Also, you may have noticed that we recently had a series of outages of our site. These outages occurred because our server became overwhelmed and ran out of RAM, leading to a great deal of "swapping." According to our support technicians and common practice, this can be fixed by upgrading our RAM. The new server will have twice as much RAM,* larger storage based on a super-fast solid state drive rather than a conventional hard drive, and a new version of the operating system that will help us keep up in the future.

*Tech note: It will seem like even more because a smaller percentage of it will be taken up by MySQL databases, opcode and object caches, various other services, and the operating system.

In addition, I will be upgrading various pieces of software. Most of these changes will be on the back end or only affect the administration of the server. However, I will be adding a bookmarking add-on, which will allow you to bookmark your favorite posts. You will also have the option to share your bookmarked posts with other people. I really hope that people will do this as we have some amazing golden threads in our forum, and if you like a thread, chances are that people who like your own posts will also like those threads.

In terms of things happening on the back end, I will spare you from that

Because we are moving over to a new server rather than upgrading an old and clunky one, and because a number of different software packages that run the forum will be affected, there will likely be periodic outages at the forum throughout the day. These should be quick, but until we have the new server, it's hard to predict whether there will be any incompatibilities between our very sophisticated forum software and the new computer that it will be running on. Either way, I will try to get things up and running as soon as possible. If you have trouble accessing the forum, just try again a little later.

I'm looking forward to a powerful new server that will provide a great platform for our future growth. Thank you for your support!