Poll Calguns Data Migration Round 2 - Aug 3

[Librarian]

It looks like they've shut down the server. I think from here, I'm going to bow out of the updates since I have a bias and I don't want to create any more animosity. If anything I want the opposite and sometimes my frustrations get the better of me. I'm sure we all hope they recover.

I'll focus more on CAguns.net and the update that we'll be doing here which will optimize page load speeds even further, enable more features down the line, and work on programs to grow the 2A community.

Perhaps you could discuss what it ought to take to handle 1,000 users or so, and about a million historical posts, with 'acceptable' performance. I'm interested in the hardware aspect. (My phone has 256 gig!)

For me, I want login to happen sub-5 seconds and page displays around 1. Searches are harder to quantify - that's some hardware, but also indexing the existing heap-o-posts.

Apparently I don't know what question to ask search engines; I don't get back anything relevant.

 

[ikeo1]

Perhaps you could discuss what it ought to take to handle 1,000 users or so, and about a million historical posts, with 'acceptable' performance. I'm interested in the hardware aspect. (My phone has 256 gig!)

For me, I want login to happen sub-5 seconds and page displays around 1. Searches are harder to quantify - that's some hardware, but also indexing the existing heap-o-posts.

There's really a multipart answer to this. It's not so much number of people moreso the number of requests per person. The engagement on this site via google analytics says the avg user spends 17 minutes here 3,000 users daily.

The forum aspect which is mostly text based
The marketplace which is mixed

Depending where they spend their time will determine how the resources get laid out. Here its split approximately 50/50 surprisingly between forum and marketplace. The marketplace serves a lot of images plus all the custom search fields. The forum does not have that so technically the marketplace requires more resources. This holds true with CG as well.

Then you have to consider spiders, crawlers, and indexers. Where there are checking your content what you want indexed vs what you don't. I block off the marketplace, because its a resource hog but want the forum so for SEO.

As such, the forum and marketplace are read heavy operations so you want more memory to cache the forum. For images, you want a Content Delivery Network with Edge Caching for images.

As for searches its as simple or complex as you want to index. Do you want to search by title, body, or custom fields. The fields in the Marketplace are all searchable here. I run a separate service which is why the memory utilization is high on our db because we index everything so when a users selects a custom field it shows up in real time. Searches here should load results in less than a second.. So it's hard to give you a direct answer because there are several layers. I offload payloads to specialized services for maximum performance and lower cost.

 

[DrJonesUSA]

I'm in I.T. but NOT an expert on web hosting & such.
Frankly I was shocked to hear the specs of the proposed new / in-progress server (as of 2024 - 08-28); I think it was 64 or 128 GB RAM, maybe 2TB disk space, 1 GBPS internet, etc. I was shocked as in they seem ridiculously low / small / nowhere near enough. But again; server / web hosting is not my wheelhouse.

I'd imagine (wild ass guess) you'd want at LEAST 2-4 servers, if not more.
WHEN - not "if" - but WHEN - a server goes down - or heaven forbid, you choose to do maintenance on it - you must have a fall-back / failover. There's your minimum of 2.
That's just for the most basic.
We're not even talking about load balancing or none of that.

I'd also imagine you would want to consider spreading the servers between north & southern CA, to help just a tiny bit with loading times & add some geo-redundancy in case of fire, flood, earthquake.
I HOPE the servers & all data are backed up constantly to a whole other state or continent, but who knows.

TL;DR:
It sounds like CalGuns is STILL trying to use a toyota Tundra to do a job that actually requires a Freightliner or 3.

JMHO (and very much non-expert opinion)

 

[DrJonesUSA]

Perhaps you could discuss what it ought to take to handle 1,000 users or so, and about a million historical posts, with 'acceptable' performance. I'm interested in the hardware aspect. (My phone has 256 gig!)

For me, I want login to happen sub-5 seconds and page displays around 1. Searches are harder to quantify - that's some hardware, but also indexing the existing heap-o-posts.

Apparently I don't know what question to ask search engines; I don't get back anything relevant.

also;
Good to see you here, Librarian! I'm same username from calguns.

 

[ikeo1]

1 GBPS internet, etc. I was shocked as in they seem ridiculously low / small / nowhere near enough. But again; server / web hosting is not my wheelhouse.

It’s bare minimum setup. It’s forum software to load on a computer is the approach.

The network and CPU seem a bit low and the system should be split into at least two tiers. I’d still anticipate issues after launch. The RAM is more than enough but CPU is the bottleneck at 90-100% on 4 cores so at a minimum it’ll be loaded to 45-50% with ~100-200 or so members. There’s no room for growth and no plan for scaling. I’m sure it’ll come back up again, but imho the user experience won’t be good. I hate to say it but it’s my assessment. For the size of the community, it needs to be professionally managed. It will only run well with fewer people..

 

[p--and--p]

as time goes by its beyond ridiculous. Running a whole site like that on the cheap cheap its a spit in the face. Everyone wants people who do the work to get paid, but then charge .10cents per gun sale ad and you'll get the money needed. The largest gun trading site has been down for a month, people moving out of state and getting guns in time for CCW renewal is vital and its just a joke. Plus losing all the itrader stuff was horrible. One guy I'm buying a gun from wanted to see my feedback and I told him its gone- if I had known I would have taken a picture

 

[Tank Mechanic]

Not a tech guy. Am a car guy. If it overloaded and slowed down at 100 members, won't the new setup (twice the size) overload at 200? If 100 horsepower is not enough, then go with 500.

 

[Radman64]

Not a tech guy. Am a car guy. If it overloaded and slowed down at 100 members, won't the new setup (twice the size) overload at 200? If 100 horsepower is not enough, then go with 500.

Like trying to drive on a freeway with a Honda 50 lol.

 

[Tank Mechanic]

Like trying to drive on a freeway with a Honda 50 lol.

With a fat chick on the back.

 

[H. Bowman]

Saw a good analogy of how Caltrans does road improvements and rather than building a road for expected traffic in 20 years, they build a road for the traffic thst happened 4 years ago during covid.

Kestryll at one point had mentioned he was expecting X number of users at any given time "because that's what we've been seeing the last 6 months" or similar...but the previous six months had been when the site wasn't fricking working so of course traffic is low.

 

[cynage1]

Is this, technically speaking, another server migration?
If so.....then 2 more weeks?

 

[HansGruber]

I've seen an influx of new users again with Calguns down and haven't followed what's happening too much. The last I saw they were doing a migration to a dedicated server because the cost to run on the cloud service doubled after a couple of months specifically because of network costs.

So here we are again. Here's some comments moving from cloud to dedicated.

What to expect from the migration:

• Server maintenance is going to be managed internally.
  • Less secure since now its not a managed server
• There will be more choices for skins and admin abilities
• The entire site will need to be reconfigured and another round of reconfiguration is going to happen.
  • More options open up but it has to be developed
• Users will have to get accustomed to more changes

So, creating this to discuss the migration and wish the smoothest transition. I don't know if it's good or bad, but wanted to give people a place to discuss.

When they did their last updates, it was terrible. It was so much better before they did all that stuff. I don’t think it’s ever coming back. A lot of the members have also been alienated.

 

[ugimports]

as time goes by its beyond ridiculous. Running a whole site like that on the cheap cheap its a spit in the face. Everyone wants people who do the work to get paid, but then charge .10cents per gun sale ad and you'll get the money needed. The largest gun trading site has been down for a month, people moving out of state and getting guns in time for CCW renewal is vital and its just a joke. Plus losing all the itrader stuff was horrible. One guy I'm buying a gun from wanted to see my feedback and I told him its gone- if I had known I would have taken a picture

I do not believe money is an issue if you run rough numbers just from what vendors such as myself were paying. Let's assume there were 0 ads and only 20 vendors and 0 members contributing. Let's assume on average the vendors paid $50 / month. That's $1k / mo just on those 20 vendors. Only a fraction of that is being spent on the hosting. The vBulletin software looks like it costs $180 - 1 time. I'm sure ads bring in money and I'm sure members are contributing monthly.

I have no idea who he has on the payroll. I was under the impression moderators were all volunteers. He has no IT staff since everything is hosted and he does everything himself as evidenced through his posts.

I'm still contributing there for now. I use it to keep in touch with what's going on and interact with other FFLs on various topics. However, at some point it won't make sense for me to keep paying for a poorly run product when there's an up and coming site such as this one. Based on @ikeo1's posts I can tell he knows what it will take to bring the community to the next level.

From what limited I have seen, Kes has not accepted the help of ANY volunteers. Many offering free time and expertise and not necessarily needing access to data. but

 

[H. Bowman]

I still don't think he's making or was making, anywhere near the numbers some people think he is/was.

At a thousand bucks a month profit(I know, it's likely more than that with vendors and contributors, but as a round previously mentioned number), compared to the amount of time that something like this would take doing it solo, I certainly couldn't afford to take the time off of my day job to devote to fixing it, and knowing IT costs, I doubt a grand would be enough to pay someone to fix it...which is why he should have taken up any of the dozens upon dozens of offers of free expert help.

I've been considering dropping my contributor status there because it's been unusable for the last 6 or 8 or 10 months. But I can't even do that because the stupid website is down (and I went in to PayPal to the recurring subscriptions page and you can't cancel there either, it says to contact Calguns.net to make changes).

It sucks, because of the history of the place, the knowledge base, the information and the camaraderie. To this day some of my very good friends come from meetups founded on Calguns and I will be resentful that what seems to be pridefulness and laziness are what ended what was a great thing. I'll also miss OT.

 

[ikeo1]

It sucks, because of the history of the place, the knowledge base, the information and the camaraderie. To this day some of my very good friends come from meetups founded on Calguns and I will be resentful that what seems to be pridefulness and laziness are what ended what was a great thing. I'll also miss OT.

It's not doom and gloom. CG will come back online, it's just on life support. The configuration is just enough so it can operate and use for historical stuff. Any legitimate growth on the system will get it crawling again. So it's usable but for a limited number of people. I think, the thought is to just have it like it was for the last 10 years and let it run with limited involvement. Many people are offering not only help but funds. The latest server is $219/mo. It's a sizable system, but I'm not sure if the specs is enough to solve the problem. One guy who was taunted on .org had the right suggestion. The site needs to be split, like it was in the cloud. That's the proper way to isolate traffic bottlenecks on larger sites. Unfortunately, the fewer people who use it, the faster it'll be.

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[ugimports]

...One guy who was taunted on .org had the right suggestion. The site needs to be split, like it was in the cloud. That's the proper way to isolate traffic bottlenecks on larger sites. ...

This is the kind of free help that community members were offering, for free. Consulting, helping with design, etc.. I saw a guy on Facebook offer to fly people out to help him (I don't even think he received a response). Not just in the past 30 days, but I saw similar offers over the last several months... Kes keeps choosing to go it alone. I don't know him personally, but I'd imagine it's just his personality. I know many people that have trouble delegating for fear they will lose their job if others come to help. It's always to their detriment in the long run. It's unfortunate.

 

[bluenoise]

CGN Appears to be back online. It's not super-snappy, yet, and there are thousands of "guests" at the moment. Hopefully, the new server arrangement is up to the task.

 

[Chupacabra]

Sometimes it's slow like molasses and other times not. It sucks less than usual.

 

[ikeo1]

It’s bare minimum setup. It’s forum software to load on a computer is the approach.

The network and CPU seem a bit low and the system should be split into at least two tiers. I’d still anticipate issues after launch. The RAM is more than enough but CPU is the bottleneck at 90-100% on 4 cores so at a minimum it’ll be loaded to 45-50% with ~100-200 or so members. There’s no room for growth and no plan for scaling. I’m sure it’ll come back up again, but imho the user experience won’t be good. I hate to say it but it’s my assessment. For the size of the community, it needs to be professionally managed. It will only run well with fewer people..

https://www.calguns.net/forum/general-discussion/the-off-topic-discussion-lounge/54242140-slow-or-is-it-me?p=54244442#post54244442

It's back up, it's performing well at 53%. When the server hits 85% the site will be slow again. so you'll see it go up and down depending on usage. There is some room for more ~500-600 users maaaybe

 

[Librarian]

Well, just tried something simple - find my recent posts.

Search Results: 2500 results in 4.7228 seconds.

Then I asked for threads with "Duncan" in the title, in the Politics Litigation and Activism forum group:

Search Results: 76 results in 0.0085 seconds.

Then I tried searching for Glock in thread titles in the Marketplace group, using date range 1 year back

Search Results: 2500 results in 2.3829 seconds.

(2500 is the standard cutoff)

So, appears that indexing has run successfully. And that performance is inside my expectations - we have not seen that in literally years.

No comment yet on whether that VB6 programmer has an opinion on iTrader; people still miss that.

If this can stay up, and stay responsive, folks can go back to complaining about moderation and difficult to use Marketplace, and preferences for other forum software.