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Forge Transparency Needed!

Posted: Thu Jan 04, 2007 1:22 am
by Jonah
There have been quite a few posts here about the forge availability.  That is, the fact that it's down so often.

It's not just the forge, the SVN has been really flaky as well.

Today we released two versions of RSGallery2.  This has been a most frustrating experience with the SVN only working half the time.  Developers work on code that can't get committed.  Testers can't test the latest version.  Fixes for bugs that might or might not be there.  We're probably going to have to release a third version tomorrow after our European developers wake up and (hopefully) get a chance to commit more of their fixes.  And then that will probably be delayed if our testers can't access it.

Next version of perForms is being pushed back for this reason.  We should have pushed back RSG2 as well but the forge buggyness took us by surprise.

Ultimately we are not expecting 100% uptime.  Everyone knows this is an open source project.  But because it is an open source project the community needs to know what is going on.  Could we have an official word on what the deal is?  Some sort of real time status would be great as well.  Ultimately, forge transparency is paramount to it's success as a development tool.

The RSGallery2 project has already moved all it's tools (except for SVN and binary distribution) off the forge, mostly because of these issues.  We don't want to be forced to move SVN and release distribution as well.

Re: Forge Transparency Needed!

Posted: Thu Jan 04, 2007 10:30 pm
by Jonah
overheard in #joomla today:
if i had one line of code for every time the forge went down all my components and modules would be finished by now!

Re: Forge Transparency Needed!

Posted: Thu Jan 04, 2007 10:33 pm
by brad
lamad wrote:overheard in #joomla today:
if i had one line of code for every time the forge went down all my components and modules would be finished by now!



We are aware of the current forge issues and have asked VA to address them ASAP.

Re: Forge Transparency Needed!

Posted: Thu Jan 04, 2007 10:44 pm
by Jonah
Thanks for responding Brad.

How is this setup?  Is VA hosting the forge in one of their data centers so that the service is essentially opaque to you?  Or is it an appliance that they gave you and is under your control?

What causes these these issues?  Are we being DDOS'd or is it bugs or too many legitmate users?  SVN and WWW downtime seem to be casually connected, how do they relate to each other?

What's the solution?  More hardware?  Or is VA's forge just not ready for this large of a project?

I'm not looking to blame anyone here.  I'm sure these issues are just as annoying to you as they are to us, but we need to be better informed.  Our users want better access to builds, our developers want tools that are always available.  I need to know what I have to do to keep our projects successful.

Re: Forge Transparency Needed!

Posted: Thu Jan 04, 2007 10:45 pm
by brian
It would be interesting to know the cause of the problems. Servers do have issues but it would be of "educational" interest to know if these problems are due to hardware or SFEE. This is the largest SFEE instal in the world so it would be safe to assume that the problems have a commercial interest for them to resolve.

Re: Forge Transparency Needed!

Posted: Thu Jan 04, 2007 10:46 pm
by brad
As a team we are looking into the constant reliability issues.
This current downtime is due to a software upgrade.

Re: Forge Transparency Needed!

Posted: Thu Jan 04, 2007 10:49 pm
by brian
Thanks for the update Brad.

Re: Forge Transparency Needed!

Posted: Thu Jan 04, 2007 10:50 pm
by brad
..and we're back now it seems.

Re: Forge Transparency Needed!

Posted: Wed Feb 07, 2007 7:10 pm
by pyperdowm
...and now it's down/very slow (AGAIN)...

Re: Forge Transparency Needed!

Posted: Wed Feb 07, 2007 7:20 pm
by Jonah
In the interest of full disclosure it should be noted that my posts in this topic were made before I was involved in the Joomla! core team.

The team is aware of the issue (and was/is as annoyed as I was) and are working on it.  So I would like to confidently assure those who have read my earlier posts that this situation of periodic short downtimes is not going to remain for long.

Re: Forge Transparency Needed!

Posted: Thu Feb 08, 2007 4:04 am
by pyperdowm
lamad wrote:In the interest of full disclosure it should be noted that my posts in this topic were made before I was involved in the Joomla! core team.

The team is aware of the issue (and was/is as annoyed as I was) and are working on it.  So I would like to confidently assure those who have read my earlier posts that this situation of periodic short downtimes is not going to remain for long.


Good to know.  I'm in the process of switching our work web site over to joomla.  Kind of a booger when you need extensions an the site is toast.

Can anyone tell us more precisely what the issue might be?  Apologies if this has been posted elsewhere, but all I've seen so far is "software upgrades" or "it's broken".  ???

Re: Forge Transparency Needed!

Posted: Thu Feb 08, 2007 10:19 am
by Tonie
Please read this.