Unity Forums Maintenance - August 27, 2018

We’re working to address the issue of inconsistent load times here on the Unity Forums forums. As such, the Unity Forums will be offline for maintenance on Monday, August 27, 2018, at 09:00 CEST (12AM PST), for an estimated 8-hour window.

For updates on downtime throughout the maintenance, follow us on Twitter.

 

Thanks for working on this, and for warning about the downtime.

 

No more 403's would be great. Thanks <3

 

As a web developer who has dealt with these very same types of issues, I feel your pain. Godspeed to you and your crew.


We'll see you on the other side.

 

@Buhlaine - Maybe it is a stupid question but will answers be running as normal during that time?

 

LOL! I'm not a web dev, but I lead the sysadmin team at my company, so we get the *other* variety of system performance issues. "My app can't be the problem. It must be your {database|network|VPN|hypervisor} causing the problem."

 

Not a stupid question! Answers should be unaffected.

 

Good luck with everything, take as much time as you need!
But there better not be Lithium installed when it goes back online .

 

Still Xenforo! Just doing some maintenance.

 

No joke, that's a big relief!
When I saw the scheduled downtime message I got really nervous for a moment.

 

"Well, it works from my machine..." haha

 

Thanks for the notice. Hope everything will be quick/easy and go according to plan. This forum is a great tool used for contacting Asset Vendors for support and most of the historical comments on their product's threads is quite useful. Please take care not to wipe out data if possible.

 

Good fortune

 

In my work in such situation I'm preparing a parallel right solution and when it's ready - just switch IP FAILOVER to another server - a break is less than 5 min - not hours I wonder what these 8 hours are for ?

 

Another posibility - if 8 hours is very necesery - is make readonly actual forum for maintenance time - users can look and search for archived posts and then maintenance time is not so bad.
Unless simply - unity can't afford a new server for the forum and want to patch it on the old server.
Maybe it's time to get acquainted with dedicated servers ?

 

Thank you for letting us know! Good luck with it.

 

Thanks for the info. <3

 

Would love to see the forums come back with a decent search function, sort by date, etc, would be cool !

 

you think you can also work on this?

Firefox is my main browser, its been like this for awhile now. and i cant even login on Firefox anymore because the icon is borked

 

Thank you for warning us! Eight hours? Wow...

 

To the folks wondering why the long outage, I can say as a long-time sysadmin myself that server work is often more complicated in the details than it might appear from just a task description. There are a lot of situations in which something that could normally be done by a simple flash-cutover can't be done that way because X depends on Q depends on V depends on A, M, and X, because someone eleven years ago didn't have the funding at the time to replace that old clunky PDP-11 in the corner so we ported its FORTRAN code onto a Raspberry Pi that was the most expensive thing the CIO at the time would fund and..... Well, you get the idea. It's really rare to get the opportunity to "greenfield" a nice tiered application architecture that is reliable, scalable, and maintainable.

Godspeed, Unity team.

 

This is part of Unity's plan to democratise procrastination.

 

Is that why they're waiting til tomorrow?

 

Not in the UK where it's bank holiday.

 

Will you update the UI of the forum ?

 

This is for fixing forum performance for some people. It's explained in the first post.

 

We're back! Thanks all for your patience.

Just to reiterate, we were working on performance and load times. There are no new features or functionalities added.

 

Sadly, this is far more sane than how these kinds of issues are actually solved at big companies with legacy computers. I suspect a lot of people would be surprised at how many big companies are still using a PDP-11, or some slightly newer (1980's) IBM Model/400 emulating a PDP-11, for all of their 'really important' data handling.

I know of a US government body that's currently running a virtual Java program to emulate an IBM 3090 (1985) that's running code that's emulating an IBM Series/1 (1976) which is running code to emulate an IBM 7070 (1961) that's running EDL. Actually, I should rephrase, they've been trying to get that running for 20 years and it's so far failed and they're still mostly relying on the few 3090s they have left.

 

Thanks for sorting it!

Its performing so fast for me right now that I am taken to posts several ms before I even click on them . Only joking, but it is blisteringly fast for me right now, cheers

 

Back to the topic on hand. There've been a few errors, time outs, and long load times, which I'm guessing was either the flood of people coming back to the forums once they started working again, or some lingering issues that popped up, but at this point it does seem much more responsive than it has been in a while. Kudos!

 

We've been working to fix some of the hiccups, but if you're noticing anything is recurring please let us know!

 

Some problems with searching -- I searched for "microsplat" and got one hit -- a mention of it in a different thread. So I toggled on Titles only, and got no results.

Similar issues searching within a forum thread -- works on some threads, but not others (I searched for 'imposter' in the Amplify Imposters thread, no results.)

 

Indeed, a former employer of mine still had actual PDP-11 and MicroVAX systems in production when I left the company in 2000. The PDP-11 was a great machine in its day, and one of the "downsides" of a really durable machine is that companies never get around to migrating off of them.

On a more positive note, my current employer does a lot of work with Linux/UNIX and with IBM mainframes. Why are mainframes still in use today? Because they still do all the things the did before, and they are the most reliable hardware you can buy, period. Modern mainframes can run multiple operating systems, including the very latest Linux, simultaneously, on a very large scale, and with impeccable hardware-level security and virtualization. Take a "legacy" system with petabytes of critical data inside an Oracle database, then use virtual Linux guests as the "glue" to make all that data accessible in a modern web GUI, and the web servers communicate with the data back-end on a virtual network at memory-bus speeds, and the whole thing has hardware MTBF measured in decades.

New isn't always better, and old isn't always bad, and old names don't always mean old technology. "It's not your father's mainframe any more."

Shameless plug: You may find it useful to have them talk with my company (I won't plug that here, but PM me if you want the data). We have a history of solving very unusual problems with very old mainframe equipment, and it's possible we might be able to help.

 

Did the performance-focused work involve a full reindexing by the search engine? If so, that may be still ongoing.

 

Does feel slightly more nippy, but is it? isn't it? perhaps it's all a horrid placebo masterminded by the evil @Buhlaine


Not really. Or is it? isn't it?

 

It's so fast I thought something was wrong ;-) Did you move the whole thing over to a quantum computer? Or an array of RTX 2080 Tis?

;-)

 

I had rooted their server and was using it for my Unity lightmap bakes, but they kicked me out.

 

It's so much better for me now. I had load times of several seconds before. Now its less than one.
Thanks Unity!

 

Thanks to Unity for fixing the Forum! Great job!!!