Project:Maintenance/042025

Maintenance Log

Be sure to review 4-13-25 for recent changes due to the site migration.

4-13 notes: Closing the old kenshiDB droplet and consolidating to the new updated server was really helpful. Lower cost, easier DNS, future assurances of uncomplicated communication between the sites, opportunities for unified auth and other API elements. It's great and bodes well for future development. The next two weeks are primarily a rollout of systems in testing. Database connection of the file storage & archive and expansion of the site's API capabilities. Stay tuned...

4-14 notes: Adjusted jobs queue, some minor elements of PHP config & other cache settings. Getting a solid sense where the heavy loads are.; Starting a comprehensive log analysis for the next 72 hours to review access, notices, warnings, errors, etc. Generally speaking this is for the sake of ensuring all set values match expected behavior. The updated jobs runner should mesh well with the current PHP config.

4-15 notes: Looking into recent release of MediaWiki 1.43.1. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Release_notes/1.43; Expect downtime -- I'll be experimenting with finding the best way to conduct minor version upgrades.; Updated to 1.43.1. Monitoring.

4-16 notes: It's difficult to describe the sea change in terms of performance and behavior. 1.43.1's update process also included touching extension versions (SMW brought up to 5.0.1). Keeping an eye out for non-functional site features. The 1.43.0 version will be permanently retained for posterity's sake.; Disabled file caching to disk in favor of other strategies and avoiding overlap with recent changes.; Reviewing MariaDB response times. Small tweaks to address particulars in slow log.; Looking into Varnish and advanced nginx configuration.; Full scrape of community resources insofar as reasonably possible. Discords, Reddit, Steam, any modding resource & vetting for viability of use.

4-18: Kernel update and general apt review. Purging old configs and removing some overly redundant logging due to improvements elsewhere.; MariaDB & PHP behaving rather nicely the last few days. Creating a master configuration file for all customized configuration elements of the server.; Improvements to the jobs queue and specifically foregoing disk-based file caching. Finding APCu runs best with full priority.; While last month the goal was 99.9% daily uptime, this month's goal of cool runnings has also been achieved. It took quite a lot of fiddling with memory pools, process management, request timeouts, cache choice and balanced resource allocation to get out of the trenches of analysis. Incidence rate of warnings and errors has diminished to negligible aside from the expected taxing parser calls and upper end of job stacking within the window. It doesn't just look fast, it is!; That said, I'm considering the final jump up the droplet chain that I'm able to make in order to really drive home the PHP handling. Everything about a wikisite boils down to PHP performance. Assuming the server isn't misconfigured you can either throw hardware at it (and pretend it's not happening) or (also) set up Varnish (and make it stop happening because Varnish does all the juggling instead). Both are viable and worth considering. Varnish is slightly harder to implement. :/