So, What Happened to AVSIM?

[BilboBaggins 82]

I had no idea of the scale of the site; that's good news for flight simulation. I wil more seriously consider voluntarily subscribing (donating) to help this service keep going. It's the least I (we) can do.

 

 

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[Christopher Low 5,425]

 

Slow for a year heh? Okay, we'll refund your membership cost. Please tell me what we owe you.

 

Probably a glass of milk and a chocolate chip cookie.

[rjmcgill 15]

Thank you for your hard work. Cpt out.

[dgraham1284 92]

Did I read this correctly? Equinix refused a shipment from HP? I have worked with them many times, and used their smart hands service. I have always found them helpful. What a shame on their part. But great work getting the site back up! Thanks for your hard work.

[btwilks 7]

I can only echo what many others have said in this thread - many thanks for all the hard and intensive work to everyone who was involved in bringing AvSim back online - great to have the site back   :-)

[Noel 4,572]

Hi Noel,

  I did read the "what happened" post and did understand a word of it. I've been coming to this forum on and off for over a year and from the first day I registered it's been slow. So I guess that's the "peak performance" level that I can expect. Thanks for the reply...

According to comments in another thread, '503 errors' and there is reason for hope the site will be performing better than pre-meltdown:  

 

From Tom:  'The bottom line? I am pretty sure that given the performance of the system today, that the 503's are an issue of the past (unless caused by me in system updates / changes) and that when we get all new replacement drives in place plus two expansion drives installed, you will see outstanding performance.'

[Marith 2]

Many thanks to Tom and the AVSIM team for working hard to get the site back online again.  As someone who works in keeping many servers running I can imagine the headaches you've been through.

 

As to people who suggest using cloud services I've lost count as to the number of times there have been outages by cloud providers (especially Amazon), lol :rolleyes:.

 

Tom, you're doing a great job and have done a great job over the years considering the service is free to all of us.  Thanks again!

[Tom Allensworth 1,532]

Did I read this correctly? Equinix refused a shipment from HP? I have worked with them many times, and used their smart hands service. I have always found them helpful. What a shame on their part. But great work getting the site back up! Thanks for your hard work.

 

You read that correctly. They refused a UPS delivery on Monday of two disks when they had previously accepted a UPS shipment to us the previous Friday.  On Saturday, despite having a visit ticket open, they didn't have me in their security system. They had the tech who was accompanying me, but not mine. Had the tech not been on some kind of list of theirs, I would not have been allowed in at all. Once we were in, things were great, but getting in was iffy there for a while.

[Dave Morgan 68]

Yes, I see the cretins have crawled out of the word work. I find it interesting that in 18 years of providing free service to the flight sim community and with only two major outages due to a hack and a hardware failure in that time, that some folks can be so adamantly negative about AVSIM...   ...I guess there has to be some kind of envy at play here.

 

Yup.

 

Wherever there's good service there'll be some fool looking to pick a fight with the provider.

 

I'm just glad you're all still there. Or, after all that hair-tearing frustration, should that be 'you're still all there'?

 

D

[Tom Allensworth 1,532]

I had no idea of the scale of the site; that's good news for flight simulation. I wil more seriously consider voluntarily subscribing (donating) to help this service keep going. It's the least I (we) can do.

 

I would be willing to bet that 99% of members here do not have a clue as to the size of our infrastructure. And they should not have to. I always have to chuckle when "experts" start pontificating about what we "should" do, "shouldn't" do, how we screwed this or that up, etc. etc. when they have absolutely no hint as to what sits in our colo cage or that we have connects to the net. Anytime you see someone post something that purports to know what we should or should not be doing because they know what needs to be fixed, just blow them a raspberry for us.

[Noel 4,572]

Tom, this of course has nothing to do w/ you personally, but even now the AVSIM site, and I just tested this against 5 other sites I visit regularly, takes 11-18+ seconds to load.  Each of the other sites takes 1-2 seconds to load.   So I guess Avsim just doesn't have the resources to have a bigger/faster server system, is this the real issue?  I suggested this before, but it seems there are ample users who very much enjoy Avsim.  Why not create a new funding drive, put the thermometer graphic displaying how far we are from goal of whatever, $20,000?, towards a higher end setup w/ some headroom.   Or, is the current system still not fully optimized maybe?  Maybe it's too early to say 11-18+ seconds will be the new norm I don't know, but it is at this very moment.

[Tom Allensworth 1,532]

I'm just glad you're all still there. Or, after all that hair-tearing frustration, should that be 'you're still all there'?

 

I will readily admit that I have lost my "snap" a couple of times over the last 10 days or so. Cats wouldn't get close, the wife would come home and yell up the stairs to my office; "is it fixed yet?" and when the answer was no, she would go visit the neighbors for three or four hours... :Big Grin:

Tom, this of course has nothing to do w/ you personally, but even now the AVSIM site, and I just tested this against 5 other sites I visit regularly, takes 11-18+ seconds to load.  Each of the other sites takes 1-2 seconds to load.   So I guess Avsim just doesn't have the resources to have a bigger/faster server system, is this the real issue?  I suggested this before, but it seems there are ample users who very much enjoy Avsim.  Why not create a new funding drive, put the thermometer graphic displaying how far we are from goal of whatever, $20,000?, towards a higher end setup w/ some headroom.   Or, is the current system still not fully optimized maybe?  Maybe it's too early to say 11-18+ seconds will be the new norm I don't know, but it is at this very moment.

 

What URL are you trying to come into? avsim.com or forum.avsim.net?

 

Also, as a gauge of improvement, look at the number of people online. Since bringing the system back online yesterday, we are seeing 1,800 + users online in the last 15 minute window. A week ago, if that number exceeded 800, the system would have been on its knees.

[Noel 4,572]

Well, if I type in avsim.com, it translates to:

 

http://forum.avsim.net/index.php?app=ccs&module=pages&section=pages&id=2

 

So yes, it's avsim.com that I try to get to.

[n4gix 4,968]

I rarely load the Front Page, but instead come directly to the forum server forum.avsim.net as it is much, much faster to load...

[Tom Allensworth 1,532]

Well, if I type in avsim.com, it translates to:

 

http://forum.avsim.net/index.php?app=ccs&module=pages&section=pages&id=2

 

So yes, it's avsim.com that I try to get to.

 

 

Use http://forum.avsim.net for the time being.