[Beacon Staff]

Problems during posting

by Beacon Staff on Tue Nov 11, 2014 3:06 pm

Hi everyone,

For the last five days or so, we've noticed that it can take a very long time for a posting to be accepted by the forum software once a posting has been created and the "submit" button pressed. This also happens when a posting has been edited and the "submit" button is pressed.

We've been working with the company that hosts our webserver to determine the source of the problem and come up with a solution. Unfortunately, it's taking longer than we expected to complete that process. We hope to have the problem solved, however, in the next few days.

In the meantime, you can continue to post to the forum and edit postings as in the past. Just be patient once you've submitted a posting -- it can take 30-45 seconds for the posting (or edit) to be processed and accepted.

We've waited until now to post about this because we kept expecting the issue would be solved relatively soon.

[Beacon Staff]

Re: Problems during posting

by Beacon Staff on Thu Nov 20, 2014 11:17 am

Hi everyone,

We just wanted to give you a quick update about the work we've been doing to address this problem.

Late last week we increased the capacity of the Beacon's server, hoping it would address the posting delays that have been occurring. We also made a number of improvements to the server intended to speed it up.

Unfortunately, the changes we made did not have much of an effect. As a result, we've concluded that the problem is actually within the datacenter where the server is located. We will therefore have to move the server to a different datacenter. We'll be doing that in the next several days.

So there probably will posting delays again today and tomorrow, especially during the daytime hours, when the delays seem to be the worst. We're aiming to have the problem taken care of, however, by the end of the coming weekend.

We appreciate your patience as we work on this problem, and we're sorry that it's continued as long as it has.

[Beacon Staff]

Re: Problems during posting

by Beacon Staff on Wed Dec 03, 2014 4:45 pm

Thank you, everyone, for your patience as we've been working the past few weeks on solving the problem described earlier in this discussion thread.

As best we can tell, we've finally taken care of the problem. You shouldn't have to wait more than a few seconds after you hit the submit button for a posting you've written to be accepted for processing by the forum software.

In addition, the forum and website overall should seem a bit "quicker" than they've been for a while.

We've upgraded the servers hosting the Myeloma Beacon and also moved the site to servers hosted at a different data center.

The upgrade and move took up a lot more time than we expected, and we're not so happy that all of this happened right as we've also been preparing for the upcoming American Society of Hematology annual meeting. But we felt we couldn't really wait to address the problem.

Let us know if you encounter any issues that you think may be the result of the recent upgrades. One reason the process took longer than we expected is that we had to make some changes to the site software as part of the upgrade. So it's possible that there might still be a few bugs that need some ironing out.

Thanks again for your patience ... and, more generally, for being such a wonderful community!