Anyone having problems with FA?

[PheagleAdler]

What are you all so scared about? It's not like you uploaded every picture, every document etc to Furaffinity and have no local backup xD

If any data of a said timespan of 6 days is lost, it's most probably just a few notes and a few pictures, which you can definetly easily re-upload without much trouble

I don't really see the big deal here

If all of my submissions from a few days ago are gone, then you use your own time to reupload them to my account, wise guy. I take this seriously because I use free time to upload, and I work a lot so I don't have a lot of free time.

 

[ZX6R]

Will you please put FA back on now, because it's been over four hours since it went offline and I have waited long enough.

It's not wise to bring FA online until the extent of any damage is known.

 

[kriwu]

If all of my submissions from a few days ago are gone, then you use your own time to reupload them to my account, wise guy. I take this seriously because I use free time to upload, and I work a lot so I don't have a lot of free time.

cant say im happy with fa being down either, but i gotta say:

if your time is so valuable that you absolutely can't deal with having to reupload some submissions, maybe you should set up your own site to use as your portfolio.

 

[GamerFox]

If it was storage failure, wouldn't FA tweet that almost immediately rather than "something failed"?

 

[Timmy Fox]

6 days? .. the backups of whatever went down are only done on a weekly basis then? That sounds like not enough redundancy to ensure minimal loss even in the most catastrophic levels of hardware failure :v

 

[Biowolf45]

Hey is the site back up yet? (I wanted to talk to my daddy )

 

[Laini]

6 days? .. the backups of whatever went down are only done on a weekly basis then? That sounds like not enough redundancy to ensure minimal loss even in the most catastrophic levels of hardware failure :v

I asked someone about that and the reply they gave me was that would be fairly standard practice for a site with FA's users. If you backup too regularly you just incur lag and/or downtime.

 

[shadow42]

ok this is why so little is said and none at all should have. look at all the panicking people here. nothing can be done about it by complaining here. it well be done when it done. we need to chill out and let them do there job to fix the problom.

 

[GamerFox]

Can we get a yes/no on whether the site was actually attacked?

 

[Biowolf45]

How ok thanks. Me and him haven't talked in awhile so I'm depressed I can't talk to him

 

[PheagleAdler]

I asked someone about that and the reply they gave me was that would be fairly standard practice for a site with FA's users. If you backup too regularly you just incur lag and/or downtime.

Even with the amount of submissions this site goes through on a daily basis?

 

[Draconas]

Will you please put FA back on now, because it's been over four hours since it went offline and I have waited long enough.

You act like it's down just for shits and giggles.
If it's down for a reason, it's down for a reason.

 

[Timmy Fox]

I asked someone about that and the reply they gave me was that would be fairly standard practice for a site with FA's users. If you backup too regularly you just incur lag and/or downtime.

6 days still feel like way too long for the amount of data that goes through per day. I'd say at least daily backups should be more appropriate, with everything scheduled and optimized for minimal lag.

In the simplest manner you could just have everything that goes onto the main storage server be automatically duplicated onto a mirror which is then backed up to the backup server which is again backed up to an off-site backup.

The only performance hit you would see is the tiny overhead of mirroring the data that goes onto the main server as all the other servers included will be dedicated for backing up and thus won't cause any lag on the primary server.

 

[wolfbeast]

ok this is why so little is said and none at all should have. look at all the panicking people here. nothing can be done about it by complaining here. it well be done when it done.

I don't know about you, but I don't see many people panicking here. I'm not, at any rate, but I do like to know at least something? Anything?

If people are kept completely in the dark and nothing is said for too long, that is when people will get pissy and/or panic. If downtime exceeds more than a few hours for a busy community site, you need to let your community know something - I should know, I've adminned plenty. It can be a simple one-liner just providing very basic information; not just "We'll fill you in later" though. Details aren't needed; just a basic grasp to prevent people making wild assumptions and the panic resulting from that in itself.

For all you people unhanded by FA being down and being cut off from loved ones: I would suggest when the site comes back up to exchange secondary contacting information (IM, e-mail, skype, etc.) so you can stay in touch when FA is unavailable

 

[shadow42]

Even with the amount of submissions this site goes through on a daily basis?

that's just the thing. there are submissions ever 15 sec on avrig that 1000s a day the were on the equipment to back that up daily would be afull and there would be a lag point on each day the backup was done. and i bet they keep a few week of back up so the hard drive space woudl be a nightmare

 

[Draconas]

It should be common sense: don't put all of your eggs in one basket.

 

[maxgoof]

Neer is most likely diagnosing this all remotely from a backdoor Admin-only terminal connection to the server farm - that makes it a bit more difficult because you can't just page through the terminal and see what's going on. And if you reset the wrong thing you can make it much worse real fast. Got to be slow and methodical.

All well and good. That does not explain why they can't take a moment to let us know the probable cause. They can change the diagnosis later if it turns out to be incorrect.

It would be lovely to get a detailed status report - but he has to figure out the status first, and by that time he's 2/3 of the way to the solution anyway - so you get that started, then you update the status... And you don't want to panic the Chicken Littles. "My Data is gone!!"

We've pretty much been assured that our data is NOT gone. We've also been assured that this is temporary. If they don't know what caused the problem, fine, let us know that they don't know and are looking into it, rather than hint that they do but aren't telling us.

If the storage server is viable but the index got corrupted, or one drive in a RAID Array dies, you have to give it time without any traffic to reindex the data or rebuild the array with a hot spare. Because if you lose a second HDD while the first is still rebuilding onto the hot spare... It can get real bad. And if there aren't any hot spares in the server someone has to go to the hosting site or put in a request for the staff to do it.

Yes, yes, yes, we all know that data can get corrupted very bad. The wording given in the explanation is all that I am concerned about. It sounds like they have a good idea what the problem is and how long it may take to fix. Let us know that. If the diagnosis changes, or the time to fix changes, let us know that.

FA has gotten better in recent times in communicating when problems occur and in estimating down times. I'd like to see them keep that higher standard going.

 

[Syfaro]

that's just the thing. there are submissions ever 15 sec on avrig that 1000s a day the were on the equipment to back that up daily would be afull and there would be a lag point on each day the backup was done. and i bet they keep a few week of back up so the hard drive space woudl be a nightmare

Uh, what?

How do you think Google or Amazon keeps backups? They have more data than FA by many orders of magnitude. Assuming you aren't already pushing the limits of your hardware that much, you shouldn't have an issue backing up your data.

Also, incremental backups are a thing. You only have to store new data instead of all of it again.

 

[GamerFox]

Just a tweet of "We still don't really know what's going on, we're still checking" would be nice.

 

[maxgoof]

It should be common sense: don't put all of your eggs in one basket.

Your avatar reminds me of Gideon Grey.

 

[shadow42]

Uh, what?

How do you think Google or Amazon keeps backups? They have more data than FA by many orders of magnitude. Assuming you aren't already pushing the limits of your hardware that much, you shouldn't have an issue backing up your data.

Also, incremental backups are a thing. You only have to store new data instead of all of it again.

yes but google and amazon have way more resources and servers where i bet fa does not have quite as much

 

[maxgoof]

Uh, what?

How do you think Google or Amazon keeps backups? They have more data than FA by many orders of magnitude. Assuming you aren't already pushing the limits of your hardware that much, you shouldn't have an issue backing up your data.

Also, incremental backups are a thing. You only have to store new data instead of all of it again.

Eh, not exactly fair to compare Google or Amazon to FA and IMVU. Yes, Google and Amazon have much bigger databases, but they also have much more staff, hardware, budget, etc.

 

[shadow42]

i also fear that we will crash fa again as we surge to get back on and start posting

 

[Syfaro]

yes but google and amazon have way more resources and servers where i bet fa does not have quite as much

Eh, not exactly fair to compare Google or Amazon to FA and IMVU. Yes, Google and Amazon have much bigger databases, but they also have much more staff, hardware, budget, etc.

Well, obviously. But it's not that hard to do sane backups even hourly, especially considering how small FA is relative.

Assuming you're not always doing full backups, smaller incremental ones would generate even less of a server load, as it only needs to do a small amount of data each time.

 

[maxgoof]

Well, obviously. But it's not that hard to do sane backups even hourly, especially considering how small FA is relative.

Assuming you're not always doing full backups, smaller incremental ones would generate even less of a server load, as it only needs to do a small amount of data each time.

Actually, I think they do incremental backups, but again, I don't have enough experience to know how much hardware would be involved in that, or time, or expense, so, I won't make any assumptions regarding it. But whatever, we just want an update.