stevegrant

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...

Essentially we have a latency issue, which is confusing as it doesn't necessarily coincide with any sort of spike in traffic (and of course the traffic is relatively low right now - the current setup was coping much better when we had hundreds online at once at full-time in any of the recent games). When the latency levels are low, the site runs very smoothly, and with decent numbers online. Then suddenly the latency jumps to 10+ seconds and it all falls over. It's baffling and there's no trace of what's causing it at the moment. To answer a few questions/comments from above: No, we're not going to use Tapatalk. It's a piece of crap that actually makes things worse. No, we're not rolling back to the old setup. The software was dated both in terms of the forum software and what was installed on the server itself, which was causing issues in itself which would have needed rectifying anyway. The old server has been decommissioned, we don't have access to it anymore.

A previous ad partner went under around two years ago owing us more than £5k, so that's basically where the shortfall lies. Once we've got something reliable in place to replace that, it should be fine, but I don't want to just put any old ad platform in place because some are horrendous in terms of taking over the page, etc.

To put the situation in simpler terms, the old server cost £300 per month and I wasn't willing/able to continue to subsidise at least half of that cost myself, so another more flexible solution had to be found.

I think Ralph said in a press conference either before or after Sunday's game that we'll be staying at home for pre-season, so yeah, it'll be a fully-domestic programme of friendlies.

Working on a few things to try to improve the performance but while minimising the cost too - essentially we've now got multiple servers running which can scale up and down depending on the load at the time. The key is tuning the threshold at which new servers are made available... bit of a trial-and-error thing, unfortunately.

Working on some things today. Essentially the old server was far too expensive compared to the revenue the site generates these days, so it's all been streamlined. For the most part it copes with the load, but there are occasional spikes that are causing some issues which I'm hoping to iron out today.

Come on convenient draw!

Why?

Only a couple of weeks ago I made a graphic and posted it on here in good faith - within 5 minutes you'd taken it and posted it on your Twitter feed. Just because you didn't say "look at the data I compiled myself", that doesn't mean there's not an implied act of passing it off. You do this a lot, obfuscate everything so there's plausible deniability for anybody who hasn't seen you pulling this shit for years, and it's fucking tedious.

The very modern "sorry you were offended" rather than being sorry for the act that caused offence in the first place. Ultimately, until he says he regrets the way in which he acted, rather than regretting that we didn't like it, I don't see a great deal of change in his portrayal among the fanbase.

You're never going to see the "evidence" that you want to see. Firstly, you have a history of taking stuff from here (and other places online) and passing it off elsewhere as your own; secondly, why would anybody in any sort of position of trust with somebody else breach that trust by providing details that could/would identify them? If you choose not to believe that Lallana left on bad terms because of the way he acted, that's up to you. The rest of us will get on with our lives quite comfortably without it.

Would expect the first three weeks to be behind closed doors. After that, it'll be reduced capacity with no away fans, and they'll gradually ramp up the % allowed in every few weeks, assuming the infection rate is under control.

He'll probably still get one. The champion club gets given a specific number of medals to distribute how they see fit, to players, coaching staff, other club staff, etc, with the only stipulation that any player who has made 5 PL appearances during the season must get one.