Site performance, Server errors, outages and tunings

[Like Ra]

I should've done this months ago, but I was pretty much happy with MySQL 5.6. However, Ubuntu 16.10 defaults to 5.7 and even the migration from 5.6 to 5.7 was not successful - at first, MySQL server was simply removed! Then it turned out that Oracle decided to change column names in the user table... What was wrong with the name "Password"? Also the DB binaries are not backward compatible anymore, so there is no simple way to go back to MySQL 5.6 or forward to MariaDB 10.x without dumping and restoring all databases. I could recover one test site, but this one did not make it. So, back to reading documentation...

That's basically what I was going to say about upgrades. All upgrades must be done "in time". Too late and the new version is either not compatible, or the old version is neither upgradable nor supported, and everything must be recreated from scratch. And the data can easily be lost this way. So timely upgrades are crucial.

[Tinker D]

I think my head hurts.
You do a great job running the site Ra. My hats and dresses off to you.
I could never do the work you do without going mad....
Wait... I am mad, I'm mad about you.

Keep up the good work my friend.

D

[Like Ra]

Only a mad person can work all days without breaks for own money. Ah, they call it hobby... 😁

[Tinker D]

You got one hell of a hobby, that's for sure.

[Like Ra]

I've got many 😁

[ltxrob]

I only have a vague idea about half of what you type in the topic area.... But thanks for what you do!! 😁

[Like Ra]

I like when small tweaks make a significant cumulative improvement.

o- Google has finally assigned the stable status to mod_pagespeed 1.11.33.1. Now Apache caches highly compressed (Instead of uncompressed) versions of web-pages parts (e.g. scripts, style sheets, etc). That means: more free memory, more free, CPU cycles, and faster page loads.

o- I moved jquery.js from the Google CDN to the site server, what in combination with the latest mod_pagespeed allowed to join almost all scripts together and compress. Also the browser does not have to establish separate connections to Google CDN.

o- HTTPS + HTTP/2 loads page components in parallel

The sum is around 20% improvement at the user side and less server load. Nice! 😉

OTOH, the latest jQuery broke the Quick Edit feature. 😁 😁 😁

[Like Ra]

OTOH, the latest jQuery broke the Quick Edit feature.

jQuery 2.2.x does not work with the forum software. Back to 2.1.4. More documentation reading 😁

[Like Ra]

I haven't properly investigated that, but apparently DeviantArt change the RSS URL structure, so the DA RSS streams are broken now. No time to look into this till the weekend...

[Like Ra]

Cleaned up the list of RSS, updated all DeviantArt links - still does not work 😟