It’s ten days since we announced blogs.perl.org and it still doesn’t work properly.
Our mistake was to launch it on a really underpowered server. It worked fine when there were half a dozen of us testing it out, but when the entire Perl community descended on it to take a look at the site (and to sign up for accounts) the server collapsed under the strain.
All of the problems that I’ve been told about so far have been down to memory allocation issues. The server has 512 MB (corrected from KB – it’s bad, but not that bad!) of RAM and it really needs four times that.
Things have calmed down over the last few days though. I suspect that’s largely because people have lost interest in the site and have given up trying to register. We’ve also switched all of the MT processes to using FCGI. I see that a few people have registered successfully and are posting entries on the site. I salute their persistence.
We have a plan for fixing the situation, however, and that will be put in place over the next week or so. The site will be moving to a new server with a more appropriate hardware configuration. We hope to minimise the amount of downtime whilst this happens.
I can only apologise, once more, for the problems. I hope that once the new server is up and running, you’ll all consider giving blogs.perl.org another try.
I hope it’s obvious, but none of these problems should be taken as a reflection on the quality of Movable Type or the work that Six Apart have done for us on the site. The problems all come down to capacity planning on the part of the people running the project.
Which reminds me – if you’re ever looking for someone to do capacity planning on your web site, I’m not the right person for the job!
I can sign in but I can’ post, which is bad. anyway, keep the good work.
I can sign in and and post, but I think something went awry somewhere along the line:
http://blogs.perl.org/users/dan_brook/2009/11/introducing-gitalist.html
Teething problems aside blogs.perl.org is a fine effort.
Dan Brook aka broquaint
Dave,
I for one really appreciate all the effort you have put into the new site. I’ve always been a big fan of MT and I think the Perl community will really benefit from a centralized blogging platform.
You really ought to post this onto blogs.perl.org. Even if you have to hack it in manually.
Thanks for putting blogs.perl.org together.
I tried to register but re-captcha keeps telling me my text is wrong. I am sure it’s possible that I made one or two mistakes, but I have tried it enough times that I think it’s unlikely that I am the problem.
Additionally, I’d like to say that there should be a contact link / email address listed on the blogs.perl.org site. I posted the issue here because there is no email address listed on the site for one to report issues to
The Captcha error is caused (like all other problems on the site) by the lack of available memory.
I managed to create and authenticate an account, however if I try the “Post” link, I’m asked to log-in again, after which I’m told I don’t have permissions to post.
Will this automatically start working once the server’s moved?