Art, Technology & People

After a lot of sweating and swearing, we’ve had time to track our stats for the last couple of days since our coding and server tweaks and updates, and the numbers are pretty clear:

You can see the highest peak is lunchtime (12PM – 2PM approx) Nov-11 and that was more or less the reflection of the high loads we were getting on the box. Later that night, you can see it dropped when we began the initial tweaks to the Apache configuration and we added additional caching to the site. As you can see on the 12th to 15th, load was still high, but it was already better. You can see the 9 hours of downtime when the load was pretty much dead from the eAccelerator pooch job. Then on the night of the 15th we did additional tweaks to the search system and upgraded Apache and PHP and the scores dropped again by a huge margin. You can see the peaks for the 16th and 17th are much lower than previous days.

Below the chart you can see the current load averages, which are right on the money with our target goal.

So congrats to Elvio, Nick and Jamie on a job well done!

Hi all,

Just wanted to share a post I just added to the P2L news area just in case any misses it:

No, we’re not looking for 3 day line-ups! What I mean to say is that I’m happy to report that with some hard work, we’ve managed to maintain a 2 to 4 day queue for tutorial approvals for about the last week and a half! I wanted to improve the time you have to wait to get your submissions looked at, so every day I have been approving tutorials for a couple of hours until I got caught up, and as of lately, by the end of the day only the last 2 days worth of submissions are waiting for approval. So I hope everyone enjoys the speedier service 🙂

Now for the publishing bit… do you like to write tutorials? P2L is looking for some folks that would be interested in beta testing the publishing/writing side of our new Publishing System. A few weeks ago we re-released the old Twodded tutorials to show you how published tutorials would look, and very soon we’re going to open up the publishing area itself to all our members. But, before we go live, we want some folks to get a taste of the new system and publish some tutorials that will test out all the kick ass functions we’ve built into this system.

So if you would like to be among the first group of publishers to beta test the writing portion of the new Publishing System, please send me a PM (Click here to send me a PM) and let me know that you are interested and what category(ies) you would like to write in. Applicants will have be prepared to do the following:

1. Write at least 1 tutorial within 1 week of being granted access to the system
2. Write the tutorial using the tools provided by the system. No copy/pasting from older tutorials and no hotlinking/public hosting etc.
3. Report any bugs
4. Use as many features as possible to test the system to the best of their ability
5. Provide screenshots and error message details to the programmers

Applicants with the following qualifications will have [b]priority consideration[/b] in being selected for beta testing:

1.You were previously a member of the P2L Twodded staff
2. You can provide samples of previous tutorials you have written

Please note, you must be a member of P2L to apply. Also, please don’t be alarmed if you apply and I do not answer you right away. I will keep a list of applicants and contact the invitees when we’re ready to test.

That’s about it for now guys, so remember to PM me if you’re interested in trying out the Publishing System!

Thanks,
Dan

Can’t wait to release this system to the public… Nick is doing a KICK ASS job on this!

Dan

Hi all,

I’ve been spending my morning tabbing between P2L and my other sites checking out how the server updates are going and I thought I’d take a second to give you guys an update on what’s happening. I decided to leave already Server4sale for a couple of reasons:

1. I just feel overall they weren’t able to deal with the constant issue of Apache locking up. Basically the server wouldn’t load any sites until someone restarted the Apache service, and this lock up would happen at least every 48 hours, although sometimes it would happen every 6 hours. This has been an issue since pretty much the first day I signed up, and a month later it was still happening. S4S tech support is lightning quick and they would quickly reset the service very quickly, but the fact that the server was so unstable and didn’t seem to be getting any better bugged the crap out of me.

2. The server underwent a couple of minor ddos attacks apparently and I didn’t like the way it was dealt with at all, plus the LayeredTech datacenter has no ddos protection on it’s network at all unless I pay additional fees for hardware protection. When I was with ThePlanet, their network had some basic protection as well as some hardware in case the ddos was significant. So I feel that between the DC and the host, they just couldn’t deal with it effectively and I was basically hanging out to dry.

I started looking around this week for a new datacenter and finally settled on SoftLayer, which has several ddos mitigation tools if required. I bought the box directly from the DC so there is no middleman, and I ended up with the same box I have now with double the RAM and a bit cheaper. Nick was able to transfer all the accounts for us and I went with a company that specializes in server management called Platinum Server Management, which monitor and maintain the server for me. So far they’ve done all the optimization and OS hardening and the server is running great! None of the initial issues I had seem to be cropping up this time around, so already that’s a great sign.

Now I just have to wait until the DNS changes kick in around the globe and see how the box runs under a full load.

That’s the deal with the servers… sorry for all the jumping around guys, I’m just trying to find a stable and solid solution I can stick with.

Dan

In case you missed the announcement, Pixel2Life.com recently re-launched the high quality tutorials that were once published under the now defunct twodded system as the first look at our new Publishing System. We still have a lot of work to do on this, but we wanted to give folks their first look at how the published tutorials will look plus we wanted to get the tutorials back online because so many of our users were requesting them.

The actual category browsing system for the tutorials is not yet functional, so the best way to see a full list of published tutorials is via the source site page at http://www.pixel2life.com/sourcesite/pixel2life_com_publish/. Included in this list is Tiago Dias’s famous Flash XML MP3 player and all the other popular tutorials that you guys were spamming me to put back online.

So what’s next? We’re now working on the actual Publishing System itself where our members will be able to write their own tutorials with full image and media hosting combined in a very sophisticated writing environment. I’ve seen bits and pieces of the interface Nick has been working on and it’s nothing short of amazing, so I’m sure you guys won’t be disappointed. We’re also going to have featured writers, ways of making some money from your tutorials and monthly prizes for top writers and contributors. We’re VERY excited about this product and I can’t wait to see what you all think of it. Stay tuned for more updates as we get closer to launch!

Take care!
Dan