Tom,

 

It's always a delight to deal with large corporate processes.... I dream of the day when a quick order to Amazon and all is done in a day.

 

Is there any way you could consider liberating yourself permanently from your consortium of companies and simply moving to Amazon Web Services?  Nothing is perfect, but they can scale faster, more reliably, and probably more cheaply, than anything else you might want to look at, or than any company will promise you.  I have this on good authority, aka, experience (though have someone expert quiz them on how elastic their elastic load balancers are, telling them whatever happens... you don't want 'em to bounce! <G>).

 

It'll all be perfect some day.

 

I've been telling myself that for approximately 2.4 million years.  Maybe next time.

 

Best of luck, and patience to all! The 3D Printable Holographic Cube of Infinite Permanent Reliable Storage is just minutes away from discovery!

 

Meanwhile, pray for thoughtful and careful quality control in Thailand, until then.......

Thank you for the great service that you offer us all!

Have you considered the feasibility of using one of the world class and very low cost cloud computing providers that also offer website services (e.g. Windows Azure Web Site service), it may make sense for you to let one of those global cloud providers host the infrastructure and provide the high availability and business continuity that the members have come to expect, so you can focus on your passion of aviation instead of worrying about disks and commodity IT services.

 

Regards,

PJ

Have you considered the feasibility of using one of the world class and very low cost cloud computing providers that also offer website services

 

We run two main servers that provide over 11 Tera-bytes of bandwidth of files and data a month. Each of those servers run 8 processors, with 32 gigs of RAM on each. Our MySql database is over 7 gigs in size. We have looked at those "cloud" systems and at a minimum, they would quadruple our costs (at a minimum and actually it could be five to six times more or greater). Each month we would be unable to predict what our final cost would be because of their variable pricing due to bandwidth and other charges. Our advertising and donations do not pay our costs now. Doing that would just cause us to shut the doors sooner than later.

 

Go to the MS Azure site and price out a comparable Linux based system. When I looked, their Linux based solution was over $4,000 a month before you priced in bandwidth and database size. Factor in 11 Tera-bytes a month and the size of the database and I shudder to think what the monthly cost would be. I can say this with certainty... The community would not be willing to pay for it, that's for sure.

Welcome back ... and a hearty thank you for all you do.

Thanks for all the hard work and bringing Avsim back online. Reeely missed all the forums and new information..

Tom, please realize that 99.9% of people back you and are grateful for this site.  Just as in anything, you will always have your bad apples as well.

 

-Phil

Mr Tom! Here is a good advice from someone with experience. Buy one extra disk. Then all RAID is good to go, wait about 2-3 months and replace one disk. After that you wait another 2-3 months and replace next disk. Continue that until you have replaced all again. Harddrives have limited life time and if you are extremely unlucky, all disks will fails at the same time in the future. By doing like I said, you will minimize that risk.

This has been asked many times by myself included, and I believe the most recent response was that server architecture needs to be reengineered (this is all my gross paraphrasing of what my brain heard) and there isn't a volunteer w/ the right credentials, but that sometime before the crash of their raid array there were active plans to hire someone to do this project which should improve routine performance.  I don't know if these changes happened during this repair, but Tom's comment,

 

'When all is said and done, we think the system will be back to good health and operating at its peak performance.'

 

I guess this doesn't really mean its peak performance has been reset to a higher level as was implied in the bit about hiring someone to do the revision--it may just mean 'peak performance' by former recent AVSIM standards.

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...

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...

 

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

Happy (and relieved) that things are working again!  All to easy to take the AVSIM folks for granted!!!  Thanks for all the hard work!

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

Hello Tom Allensworth

  I was just making an obsevervation not complaining. I don't take your sarcasum as a very nice gesture and I do believe that I wll not visit this site anymore. I was hoping that the negitive comments I had read just receintly concerning AVSIM were wrong but I guess they weren't. I'm quite dissapointed. Consider the matter closed, you won't hear from me again...

 

Regards,

Chris Laffin

Hello Tom Allensworth

  I was just making an obsevervation not complaining. I don't take your sarcasum as a very nice gesture and I do believe that I wll not visit this site anymore. I was hoping that the negitive comments I had read just receintly concerning AVSIM were wrong but I guess they weren't. I'm quite dissapointed. Consider the matter closed, you won't hear from me again...

 

Regards,

Chris Laffin

 

Well Chris, we'll probably help you along the way, but with a total of four posts and one of them being:

 

 

My question to those involved heavily in AVSIM is why is the connection and maneuvering time so slow within AVSIM? It just seems to take an unusual amount of time too load from the start. Other web sites load very quickly it's just AVSIM that drags butt. Why is this? Thanks for any reply, that from reading other posts, I won't hold my breath for.

 

And you won't hold your breath for an answer, you are some positive kind of dude and yes, I can understand your disappointment - you didn't get all that you paid for... You did get an answer to your first post in this thread however. So, with that, you are welcome to to do as you have suggested you will do. We will miss you.

 

 

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. The slowness and the 503 have been due to these disk corruption issues, not the architecture that we had thought and had scheduled to change (which is still in our road map by the way). I guess there has to be some kind of envy at play here.

 

I am sure the ones who criticised you most over the past days where those who missed you most.

I didn't criticise avsim, but still missed it. Thank's for your effort in bringing avsim back to us.

 

Ralf

:friends: Hi everyone. Nice to see the site back up and the members.

I am sure the ones who criticised you most over the past days where those who missed you most.

I didn't criticise avsim, but still missed it. Thank's for your effort in bringing avsim back to us.

 

Ralf

Yes, along the lines of the messages that described the "loss of community" over this past week. How Avsim hosts forums for so many product developers. For me, some two bit puddle jumper, I check the site first thing every morning and yes, I feel its absence. Hell ya I want to blame Tom, or the hacker, somebody...these Azure golden conucopia out-of-reach cloud providers. Like frikkin angels they are.

 

So, Tom, you should just chill, imo. I wouldn't count on not being vilified, but it's not because we hate you; it's more like we hate to miss you.