Direi che c'è qualcosa cmq che non funziona.

Direi proprio di si...

Stanotte Varnish e' stato temporaneamente disabilitato onde poter studiare meglio la situazione ed individuare la corretta combinazione di chiamate HTTP da cachare e non cachare, dunque arduino.cc (ed annesso forum) risulteranno nuovamente un poco rallentati soprattutto in orario serale (quando arriva il grosso del traffico dalla costa orientale statunitense).

There is still a problem with links to the old forum.

Old forum has been dismissed in September, most of contents has been placed on the new forum (48808 over 49842 topics) but some of them - as the one linked - produced some technical problem and were leaved behind.

Somehow better: Varnish caches were oversized on our current amount of RAM and slowly saturated all resources, some previous connection failed (Guru Meditation = web server unable to provide fresh contents to first-line cache) and tonight (CET timezone) I found the server completely unable to serve new requests due memory saturation.

Now I've limited size of those buffers and situation reached a new balance, it needs more tuning but at least services are available again after the latest crisis.

Thanks to Nick Gammon to alert me by mail about the recent issue.

I've gotten this several times today when replying to a thread

An error from our new Varnish instance, still to be tuned and perfected but which at least granted the availability of the service also yesterday (announcement of Arduino Esplora).

Can you retrieve the URL which generated the issue? Or the procedure driving to that notice?

All of you will be alerted and asked to report me about undesired behaviours, I expect your collaboration ;-)

Here we go: Varnish is actually in action.

Connections from authenticated users are passed to the backend, but all traffic from occasional users (e.g. people landing to the forum from Google) are managed by the cache.

If you encounter problems, errors, unexpected behaviours and so on, drop me a line in this thread or via webmaster@arduino.cc

Thanks for support and further suggestions.

Today we hit a new low in server responsiveness, but cause is unknow: traffic was the same as always, no major content was published and visited, no anormal processes were running... I'm still reading logs to find a reason...

Also, I spent just a little time in reading Varnish documentation and testing elsewhere: still some issue about cache management, but I think next week I can run it on main server. All of you will be alerted and asked to report me about undesired behaviours, I expect your collaboration ;-)

any reason why that one got forgotten?

My fault in configuring the new board.

Thanks for your alert.

Keep us posted on your efforts, please.

Improvement of the day: PmWiki's FastCache has been enabled on Arduino Playground also (on the main Arduino website it was already in place).

Current load average of the server is between 7 and 10, quite good compared to the common 20 and the 240 peak of two days ago.

So instead of me just complaining, perhaps I can help a bit.

Pleased to see your collaboration :-)

The version of mootools is from 2006(!!). Why would two overlapping frameworks be needed? jquery should do everything.

Good question, the response is "I don't know". Mootools seems required by the current SMF's theme but it is unclear to me the usage, I will try to disable it on our development instance and see what it happens.
About using Google's CDN for jQuery: you are absolutely in reason, the test for migration to 1.8 is in my schedule (since far too long time, really).

I've be interested to know about this bad performance and what the conditions were.

I've observed the experience of a friend of mine, on a small media coverage website with low traffic (peaks of 50 concurrent visitors).
Too often the HTTP request failed in an error by Cloudflare complaining it was unable to find the target content, and very little hints was provided to correct the issue.
Not a so good impression...


This morning I began to put a cache plugin on the Wordpress instance driving the Arduino blog, just to provide a quick and dirty solution to the still moderately high traffic driven by the latest post published. And the Varnish documentation is opened on one of my browser tabs, ready to be implemented on the development server in next days.

Today's problems have been mostly caused by the huge traffic drived by the latest post on our blog
http://arduino.cc/blog/2012/11/26/kickstarter-trademarks-and-lies/
For all the day the load average on the server has been above 200, and our 8 processors never stop to run.

That permitted to put in evidence large optimization margins still existing on this server: discrete performance tuning has been constantly in place in last two months, targetting above all the forum, but other major portions of the whole Arduino web platform still needs some revision.

In addition you could switch from Apache to something fast like Nginx, and the version of php is hopelessly out of date.

nginx has been considered but actually is not an option: migration would require a large porting of current Rewrite rules, now massively used to glue together all the pieces. Not impossible, but requires some time.

The very first and easiest free thing to do would be to use Cloudflare

I've observed bad performance of Cloudflare on at least one website far smaller than the Arduino's one, it impressed me quite negatively.
Did you had some positive experience?

Then you could add in Varnish cache

Yes, this is already on my todolist ;-)


Sorry for the bad service seen today, your sysadmin is working for you.

Ma non era stato detto a fine estate che avrebbero migrato il tutto su un server proprio, proprio per evitare questi problemi?

Il forum Arduino si trova gia' su una macchina dedicata, con 16GB di RAM e 8 processori. Spesso tutti con carico al 100%.

Il numero di visite al giorno e' aumentato del 24% nel giro di due mesi (piu' esattamente contando da sabato 29 settembre a ieri, sabato 24 novembre), un po' per "effetto collaterale" delle nuove release (Arduino Due, lo shield Wireless...) un po' per crescente interesse nei confronti del progetto, e i costanti ritocchi alla configurazione di sistema evidentemente bastano a malapena a contenere tale mole di traffico.

Periodicamente introduco qualche nuovo cambiamento, prima o dopo trovero' la combo risolutiva.

Should I post the webmaster about that?

Yes, please send a mail to the recently created mail address webmaster@arduino.cc with your notice.

Only in recent period Arduino has been empowered with staff dedicated to the website maintainance, so probably all (or at least most part...) of your alerts, suggestions and corrections will find an effective application within a reasonable interval of time.

Thanks for your feedback and your collaboration.

A seguito delle svariate segnalazioni ricevute in merito agli scarsamente soddisfacenti tempi di risposta del forum Arduino si e' avviata una progressiva opera di ottimizzazione e razionalizzazione delle risorse sulla macchina. I contenuti sono stati indicizzati per mezzo di un indexer esterno al database, per rendere piu' efficienti le ricerche (una delle funzioni piu' usate e, ahime', abusate), ed il vecchio forum basato su YaBB (dismesso oramai tempo fa) e' stato riversato sulla piu' nuova piattaforma onde concentrare il traffico (e conseguentemente e' stato rimosso il link che appariva nel box in alto a destra).

Tali provvedimenti hanno portato negli ultimi giorni a qualche miglioramento, testimoniato dall'abbassamento dei tempi di caricamento medi delle pagine registrati dagli strumenti di monitoraggio, che spero apprezziate.
Altri ne seguiranno nelle prossime settimane.