MediaWiki:TFWiki location

This page is part of the Project:community record, attempting to document the milestones in TFWiki.net's community in some reasonable amount of detail.

TFWiki.net has moved several times since 2005 as it has grown. These include some internal migration around the Wikicities servers as the original community grew in 2006/2007, as well as two major moves in Fall 2008 and Summer 2009 as the community moved out of Wikicites in search of a hosting solution robust enough to meet its needs.

May 2009 move

On March 27th, 12 days after the Bookworm Crash, when it became clear no help (or, often, communication) would be forthcoming from the TFWiki web-host, the search for a new server formally began. The community's vision for a new server was a humble Quaker-like one:

Stemming from TFWiki.net's general preference for deliberate rather than drastic action, this search was expected to take several months, before settling on a hosting solution that would provide the reliable, secure and dependable hosting to meet TFWiki.net's needs.

Unfortunately, things did not go as planned. TFWiki.net's server began to degrade, suffering increasing bouts of mysterious downtime at all hours of the day, peaking on April 6 when the site went down for 6 hours, cause unknown. The source of this degeneration was never clearly established. TFWiki.net's host was unable to diagnose the cause of this behavior, and so rather than fix the underlying problem, jury-rigged the server to reboot itself every 12 minutes]-- creating a continuous series of brief service-outages in order to prevent the full-on blackouts.

Site uptime continued to degrade, albeit as a slower pace. In mid-May, the increasing site traffic as the Transformers Animated series approached its finale began to somehow overwhelm the capacity of the increasingly-mysterious Houston server, resulting in the troubling "too many connections" failures during peak hours. For those of your keeping track at home, the Houston Server is now failing on at least 4 different fronts.

On May 24th, 2009, TFWiki.net locked its database from editing and began the process of moving to a new server, intending to move the site in the 5-day window between the Series finale of Transformers Animated and the beginning of BotCon 2009, whose three-fold increase in traffic would cripple the site if it were not moved off the Houston servers.

The state of the Wiki is... okay, that's pretty awesome actually.

On May 26, 2009, the site was fully transitioned and re-opened to editing on the new server. The move (originally planned for after the traffic peak) was complicated by the decision to perform several long-overdue upgrades simultaneous to the transition, updating the software and adopting a new cache-delivery system to cope with increasing traffic, as well as an ignorance about the state of the Houston server itself-- a blind migration between fundamentally different systems bringing its own headaches.

TFWiki.net's tech noted the process was "Like screwing a saltwater fish in orange juice while wearing condom"

Configuration problems combined with BotCon traffic caused downtime through the 30th, until TFWiki.net's resident cephalopod-wrangler finally managed to coax the Squid caching system out of its grotto and beat it against a flat rock.

Minor header problems persist, and are being dutifully hunted.^(Jun-08-09)