Jump to content

Neil's Blog

  • entries
    100
  • comments
    143
  • views
    170,861

About this blog

the eFestivals blog

Entries in this blog

server tuning 2008 pt 2

Well, today is the first 'busy' day of the year, with T in the Park officially announced in an hour or so. With RATM having already leaked the line-up, traffic has been busy on the site since first thing this morning, and the servers have been coping absolutely fine - no stress at all. For those who might have been on the site at around 8:30 this morning and experienced difficulties, that was for an entirely different reason - I was doing a little more pruning of non-festie posts, which is ve

Neil

Neil

server tuning

Following the problems of last Monday night (when the Reading/Leeds announcement was made) with accessing the forums - they were incredibly busy - I've been looking at how things might be improved before Glasto ticket day. Some changes have already been made that should see a small improvement of around 5%, and a number of other issues have been identified that should improve things a fair bit more. Rather than just go ahead and make the changes and then discover that too late that it's ma

Neil

Neil

server tuning

It's that time of year again when my thoughts start to turn towards the mad ticket on-sale days and the stupid load it puts on the eFestivals servers for just a couple of hours each time. Last year I came up with a solution that worked reasonably well but not as well as I'd hoped for. So this year a number of steps have already been taken which have improved things substantually, and with some more things still to do I'm reasonably confident of a better result this time around. Fingers crosse

Neil

Neil

rumours

I've just visited the official Download forums for the first time in several years and they're hilarious. First up was me noticing the forums becoming unusable for a while with a "server busy" message ... which happened to coincide with school's morning break time. At a guess - because i've seen it year on year on the eFestivals forums - a large number of the people posting there are not attending the festival and know they're not; they're posting just to pretend to be 'cool'. Anyway, t

Neil

Neil

RSS feeds

As a part of the website redesign (which will go live within the next week sometime) there's now an RSS feed available of the latest eFestivals News. For all the information, please see here.

Neil

Neil

radio star? :-)

I've just been approached by a major radio station to help them with a long show they're doing about festivals - from what they've said so far, it sounds like there could be me droning on about festivals for around 15 minutes! Those that know me know that I can talk about festivals for hours and hours and hours, but that doesn't mean it's actually interesting or anything anyone wants to actually hear. It looks like I'll be spending some time in a recording studio tomorrow to do the piece

Neil

Neil

performance testing

a major bit of performance testing has just been carried out, and given me one set of numbers. I now have to do some re-configuration of the servers, and do the test again to get a another set of numbers. Hopefully, the second test will give significantly different - and better - results. If that proves to be the case, then the re-configuration will need to be made permanent, and these forums will perform better* on Sunday than they did when the Reading/Leeds announcement was made. (*actua

Neil

Neil

pay to say

Payola was a big thing in the past; it probably still goes on - taking money from record companies to feature their products on mainstream radio to help push sales - but it's probably so engrained into the music biz now that it's no longer considered a scandal. From a moral point of view it probably makes bankers look honest. There's a second version of payola, which works within what is known as journalism. It's not actually journalists who do it of course, because writing fiction is not wha

Neil

Neil

our first festival video

This summer eFestivals has branched out into producing videos about festivals. Although self-produced videos are becoming a bigger thing as the technology improves and becomes easier, nearly every festival video out there is of the "look at me and my mates being daft" kind, which aren't of much interest to anyone who doesn't know those people. We've gone for quality and a more professional angle, with a more documentary feel, to give a feel of what a festival is all about. We've already

Neil

Neil

one for the personal 'cool moments' list :)

I stopped at a garage today to fill up with some petrol, and about a minute later a posh-ish motor pulls in. Out gets Peter Gabriel, and he looked across at me, nodded and said hello.... like I'm his mate. OK, I had met him earlier in the afternoon at a press conference, but that was there (I don't count something like that for a 'cool list' as I expect to come across such people now and then thru my job), and this was out there, on the street. BTW, if anyone is wondering if Peter is get

Neil

Neil

on the blag

Why does the world and their dog think that eFestivals is here to provide their organisation with a special and personal service for free? Very regularly, eFestivals gets emails from research assistants who want to get us to do their research for them. Very often, the info they're after is easily available and easily findable on the website, but they can't even be bothered to look. Not only that, they are very often offended at being told that us doing work for their commercial benefit will c

Neil

Neil

now with added eye candy

With more staff on board, there's more time to spend on doing all those those things which there was never time to do... The latest change is added eye candy on the main news page. As time allows, similar things to pretty up the site will be added.

Neil

Neil

not so wet wet wet

My own visits to camping festivals are over for another summer, and despite officially being the wettest summer on record I've not seen that much mud. Last summer I went to eight camping festivals. In every case there was more rain than any sensible festival goer would want, much use of wellies (tho I did get away with properly-waterproof trainers once or twice), and it was often far colder than you'd expect even with a British summer (the official stats confirm last summer as colder than thi

Neil

Neil

noble global, or just plain daft?

I keep getting press releases for Global Cool - an organisation set up to help fight global warming thru reducing your emissions and offsetting. At the bottom it always says that they're "one of only four current organisations who reach the Government’s proposed standards for carbon offset schemes". I was aware that only four organisations have been approved (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6276305.stm), and I was aware that The Carbon Neutral Company - who eFestivals use for offsetti

Neil

Neil

no water

I woke up this morning and turned on a tap, to have only a trickle of water come out - luckily enough for the kettle. When I went to the shop over the road, I discovered that a main has burst nearby, and this whole area is without water. It's not like I can't cope without water - I bought a litre of bottled for brewing up, but it's bugging me that I can't flush the loo, do the washing up or put some clothes washing on, even tho I know that there's guys out there working to sort the problem an

Neil

Neil

new website feature coming soon....

I've just had confirmation that something that has been planned as a nice addition to the eFestivals website for the last 18 months is able to go ahead - the current plan is for it to hit the website on 1st May, tho it might slip back a little as there's still a lot of planning to be made. This is an exciting development, and one I hope that people will enjoy. I'm going to be keeping the exact details of what this is under my hat for the moment (so those that know, no mentioning what it i

Neil

Neil

new festivals website

Well, almost eFestivals now also has the domain eFestivals.com ... it was on sale from a 'domain broker' (that's a domain tout to you and me) for very very VERY silly money - $35,000. But I'm pleased to say that nothing anywhere near as stupid was paid for it. It was bought mainly to protect the efestivals.co.uk brand. If someone else had bought and used it to start a festivals site then I'm sure it would eventually have impacted on (this) efestivals. At the moment, I'm not sure how i

Neil

Neil

MyFestivals groups

Many people appreciate the tight moderation of the main forums here, as it keeps the forums focused on the festivals they're about - unlike other forums on other websites, they don't become full of posts about what someone had for lunch and other very-off-topic things. To give those users here who would like more freedom to chat about their favourite festivals and anything else, we've now added MyFestivals Groups. Anyone can create a group along with a forum for that group, and the leader of

Neil

Neil

my wonderful secretary

I have - apparently - a wonderful secretary, who calls festival organisers to arrange access for eFestivals staff. This is the latest scam being tried by some to blag their way into festivals. Are people really so stupid to think that something like this will work? The answer of course is yes . Does it work? Nope - and these people aren't even clever enough to cover their tracks. Scammers are always a few sandwiches short of the full hamper.

Neil

Neil

My brain is currently in development, you may experience some instability

For the last three minutes, I have been working away behind the scenes () to add details about this year's festivals onto the forum calendar and the main forum page. This is just one of many new developments coming that's the culmination of 3 weeks work - it would have been sooner but we do have to stop to eat a curry now and then, and to whip the hamsters to paint your computer screens that bit faster. Although a project of (not) enormous complexity and scale, we're going to waffle in a pato

Neil

Neil

movin' on....

It's now nearly a year since I moved more into a back office role for eFestivals, and it's been pleasing to have the time to get many of the things done that have been put to the side for years simply because there's not been the time to do them without putting myself thru bad insomnia. It's been great to get a bit of my life back. Much of what's been done won't have been noticeable to anyone, and even many of the bits that are visible to website users will have probably passed many people by

Neil

Neil

more server upgrades

Another upgrade was made to the eFestivals servers last night, after a week of false starts, technical failures and cock-ups in trying to put things in place. Anyway, the new set-up really is the dogs (as is being proved right now with the traffic for V tickets), and come Glasto ticket day I expect things to cope extremely well - the capability of the new servers is massively greater than what was in place two years ago for the last Glastonbury (and even back then eFestivals was the only maj

Neil

Neil

more Blog software

A few of the default settings have been changed (for the better, hopefully), and the link to the FlashChat chatroom has been added to the Blog pages.

Neil

Neil

moan moan moan

Six months ago I got flashed by a speed camera in Bristol (where I live). Thru came a form giving me some options, I ticked the "i want to pay a £60 fixed penalty", and sent it back. Then nothing. Today I got a summons. So not only have I not had the option to actually pay the fixed penalty (the first form didn't give the option to pay at that point), the frigging summons is for Taunton Court - how does that work then? So I phone the camera unit and say "I never had the option to pay the

Neil

Neil

×
×
  • Create New...