stevegrant

Second Round Burnley v Sheffield United Burton v Aston Villa Bradford v Lincoln Leeds v Hull Everton v Salford Wolves v Stoke Rochdale v Sheffield Wednesday West Brom v Harrogate Middlesbrough v Barnsley Derby v Preston Newcastle v Blackburn Morecambe v Oldham Fleetwood v Port Vale West Ham v Charlton Ipswich v Fulham Oxford v Watford Bournemouth v Crystal Palace Leyton Orient v Plymouth SOUTHAMPTON v Brentford Bristol City v Northampton Reading v Luton Millwall v Cheltenham Brighton v Portsmouth Newport v Cambridge Gillingham v Coventry

The reason for the lack of an update was basically because I was so fucking fed up of just reading a constant stream of whinging from people. One user who I attempted to help many years ago when he wanted a "fresh start" with a new username (but managed to out himself inside about 6 hours) and has been one of the more constant presences in this thread won't be troubling us again. The issue appears to be a particular inefficiency within the database (for those that understand this sort of thing, some of the key tables are denormalised and the indexing is a mess) - looking in depth at the structure of it, I'm amazed they've managed to make a viable business out of something that is basically a creaking pile of crap with a shiny skin that makes it look modern. There is a new version due out soon, so I'm hoping they've fixed some of these issues in that release, but it seems at the moment that we basically get three or four days of acceptable performance followed by a week of carnage. I've got some DB experts looking at it at the moment, but the concern is that if we make changes to the database itself (adding indexes, partitions on large tables, etc), that might have negative knock-on effects to other tables and big queries that are run often.

Kayne McLaggon scored a consolation for Barry Town United in their 5-1 Europa League qualifier defeat this evening against the mighty Faroese side FK Runavik.

To clarify, the 15% figure for non-league is for the first two weeks, then it goes up to 30%. There's also the slight caveat that the 15%/30% is based on the minimum required capacity for ground grading at that level of football. Taking Sholing as an example, they are in Step 4 of the National League System (i.e. the non-league pyramid, where the National League is Step 1), and the minimum capacity for grounds at that level is 1,350. 15% of that is 200, so that'll be their capacity for Stage 1 of the re-opening. Stage 2, from 31st August onwards, that capacity raises to 30%, so they'd then be allowed 400 in.

It can be today for you if you like? Getting pretty fucked off with the snide comments from people, to be honest. Absolutely nothing, that's what's so confusing. I've got an AWS specialist company looking at the database as I'm pretty sure the bottleneck is all there (the server CPU is constantly very low, so it's not a load issue), but ultimately the problem is actually likely to be in the software itself as there are a couple of queries that are probably run on every page load that are causing the issue. It'll just be a case of changing some settings in the database that will mitigate the issues until they're (hopefully) fixed in the next version of the forum software - that's supposedly due fairly soon.

They can take promotion and cup-related bonuses out of the equation, but the usual win and appearance fees would still be included, I think.

Pretty sure there is an instalment plan - it's just not being run by an external finance company where there could be potential legal issues with pro-rata refunds.

Playing around with some of the caching options - there are some really weird and seemingly inconsequential settings that, having looked at the database logs, might be doing a bit more than expected...

Couple of points: Firstly, as I've said before, it doesn't seem to actually be a case of resources - the CPU usage on the one single server we're currently using is barely getting above 30% at peak periods (we have auto-scaling in place to build extra servers to take the load if it goes above a 5-minute average of 40%). There seems to be occasional bottlenecks that don't correspond with traffic spikes; for example the evening after the Man City game we had 1160 people online at the same time and it coped with it without too many issues. I, and a few others I've spoken to, believe there are a few flaws in the way this software works, but the developers obviously aren't willing to accept that and are pretty unhelpful when it comes to trying to debug things, so we're largely left to our own devices. I've made another slight tweak this evening to the way emails (registrations, daily digests, etc) are sent out, because that was something I saw a huge problem with on another site, and I suspect that might be an issue here. Secondly, while your sentiments are noted, I must admit I don't particularly share them. The previous iteration of the site was largely left to run itself for a number of years which has seen a tailing-off (which was a mistake on my part but I simply didn't have the time to work on a full migration which the terrible world situation has afforded me this summer), but I've still not seen any other Saints site that has as many users as this one. It's not perfect, but to be honest I'm not losing any sleep at the prospect of a few people getting pissed off at some technical difficulties after a big migration.

I don't think it's traffic-related, we've had many more people online simultaneously compared to this morning or yesterday. We'd basically had 3 days of pretty much seamless running, the latency was minimal so everything was fine. Then at around 2:25pm yesterday, it suddenly spiked and it's been up and down quite a lot since. I've seen similar issues on another site running this software (bigger site, but near-identical infrastructure setup) and it's probably going to be a case of working out which database queries are causing the bottleneck, and that could be a slow, painful process - the software is not open source, and the company who developed it have gone to a lot of trouble to make it very hard for outsiders to debug anything, and their tech support is worse than useless. Basically they want people to commit to paying a monthly fee to them for hosting on their own platform, rather than a six-monthly self-hosted licence. We're not going to be doing that because it's laughably expensive. I guess the off-season is the ideal time for this to flare up, if ever there was an ideal time for it...

There's a 5% tolerance within which the penalties are purely financial and automatic - for every pound overspent up to the 5% tolerance, that is the fine payable and the revenue is split evenly between all of the compliant teams in the division. For any club going over the 5%, they get referred to an independent disciplinary commission who would have the power to impose pretty much whatever penalty they want.

No they won't. Any pre-existing contracts can be honoured and will be rated as the division average for cap purposes. For example, if they're basing it on a 20-man first-team squad (can't remember what the number was), that's a £125k average, so any player already on a contract that's higher than that will only count for £125k for the duration of that contract. Worth also emphasising that there's nothing to stop clubs paying one player £20k a week and splitting the remaining cap money between the rest, so it's not a case of "they can't sign Player X because they can't pay him any more than £2.5k a week". Also, I think players under a certain age don't count towards the cap either, so if they've got a top young talent they could theoretically pay that player whatever they wanted.

Suspect he's probably better off out of there these days. Local papers aren't really that local anymore, they're generally all owned by big companies (Newsquest, in the Echo's case) who don't seem to be particularly invested in producing actual quality local news for people. All they want is advertising views and clicks, hence why most of their websites are completely unusable, and they've been shedding staff for years - some of that is natural churn, but a lot of the Echo's operations are now run from the offices of their sister paper in Bournemouth. I've heard they may even have put the Test Lane site up for sale, which is slightly more understandable since the pandemic has shown that most people are perfectly capable of working efficiently and productively enough from home.

Only if we assume that the players they still have under contract on good money are any good...

No, it doesn't quite work that way. Any contracts that are above the division-mandated average that were already in place before today will be counted as that average amount either for the duration of that contract or until a new contract is signed.

Interesting that Millwall have released details via their Supporters Club of how they anticipate things working for them initially. Capacity will be 6,000, including corporate and director areas (usual capacity is about 19,000, I think), and as only 2,600 have renewed their season tickets so far (had around 7,000 last season, apparently), they've decided that those people will automatically get entry to every game (assuming capacity isn't reduced again) and that they will only sell another 900 for the time being. 600 seats taken for corporate hospitality and directors, so the remaining 2000 will be allocated to applications with priority given to last season's season ticket holders, with the proviso that if a 19/20 season ticket holder takes up their priority access for a game, they won't be eligible for the following home game, they'd have to wait until further down the line. Sounds overly complicated, but it's going to be really difficult for clubs to come up with a solution that is "fair" to everyone, and you're never going to be able to please everybody.

No, that was the frustrating thing - the number of requests hasn't changed at all, but perhaps there were some bots running searches on the site rather than spidering links like most would do. All a bit weird.

Well I'd take 1000ms over 30,000ms So last night I went through the general permissions across the site and turned off search for guests. Turns out that guests seem to do a lot of DB-heavy searching - who knew? 🤷‍♂️

Not sure. There's a lot of caching being used to reduce the number of database queries, and I guess where the Lounge is lesser-populated than the main forum, there might be fewer cache-saving triggers, but that's a complete stab-in-the-dark theory. I did notice this afternoon that one of the caching engines we use wasn't - for reasons unknown - actually installed and running on the servers. Having installed and activated it this afternoon, the CPU usage has reduced significantly (although it wasn't high anyway, barely touching over 20%, which makes the latency issue even more infuriating and confusing) and the auto-scaling we have in place has decided that one server is sufficient for our needs at the moment. We'll see how that continues...

Take this as an example (time is GMT, not BST, hence the hour difference), most of the time the latency is fine, but then you get this one weird spike that screws everything up for a couple of minutes - and it is a short period each time, it's just the last few days has seen loads of them in a relatively short space of time so it's seemed like it's constant.

Can't be that, the spikes aren't constant...