Last week our storage for media pieces maxed out at ~32000 pieces, preventing uploading of new pieces. During this week we have reorganized storage to use directory schema that allows practically unlimited amount of pieces and all of the pieces are now copied to new storage and the storage is activated. Uploading pieces should be working.
This change could also lead to some kind of speed gains, as we don’t have to deal with one huge directory anymore.
Teachers in Georgia have especially been very productive with great photos and images and we hope to see the flow of great resources continuing after this unfortunate pause.
Our hosting service found the cause of late performance problems and LeMill.net should now be much more comfortable to use.
There still is an issue of us having too many great media pieces, and the directory where they are stored cannot hold them anymore. This requires us to reorganize the storage, which will take few hours some night when there isn’t much activity.
Hello, and apologies for late slowdowns in LeMill. We have been working really hard to fix them, but unfortunately my efforts have often been misguided: I have found some slow operation that seems to be the cause and found out how to speed this operation on our test server, and when we finally have the fixed version running in actual LeMill site, we have found that the service is still as slow as it was — the problem was elsewhere.
Now we have extremely professional people from LeMill’s hosting service looking at the issue, and as he has much more better view on how the data moves in our system, he can probably soon point where the problems are.
In mean time, I’ve found two possible causes or minor causes of slowdowns and fixed them.
Making the problem worse is that the slowdown is at its worst when restarting the service, so activating our fixes at daytime is often not worth the uncertain benefit.
I hope I can get some of the problems cleaned during tonight 15.12-16.12, 23:00 EET onwards.
During last weeks there have been an insidous defect with print resources: you can create them, and they seem to be saved properly, but when trying to download a newly uploaded pdf, it will give an 8kb file that won’t open in pdf viewer.
Last week we became aware of this defect, and found that all of the new print resources were saved in temporary folders and not in their proper places. All of the print resources created before thursday, 19th were moved to right place and should work fine. At sunday we finally found the cause: After any object is renamed or moved, there are certain scripts that need to be run, but these are run in such way that if there are errors, they are not visible in usual places and running of these scripts just stops, thus leaving some important cleaning operations undone. Now print resources should work fine. Also this was the real cause behind many problems we have had lately with broken catalog objects breaking some collections or member portfolios.
Now we still have to repair those print resources created between thursday evening and monday midday, and check the catalog once more for new broken resources. But in total things should be better now: there are no data lost, and recent slowdowns are also caused by time-consuming creation of error messages and extended looking for missing objects.
We are happy to announce that now it is possible to download collections as PDF booklets. The booklet will contain a table of content, teaching and learning story and content, methods and tools that have been added to the collection. In addition to PDF booklet it is also possible to download collections as zipped HTML files and SCORM packages. An example PDF booklet that is created from LeMill collection is embedded below.
Some things went wrong with the last upgrade. We replaced the old WYSIWYG text editor with the new one that supports also Safari browser. You can see the new editor in Methods and Tools section. Unfortunately the editor is not working correctly in the web page and exercise templates (#1927). The second major defect is related to presentation template. People receive an error message after the presentation is uploaded (#1929).
It might take more time to fix these defects. We apologize for the inconvenience.
At tuesday, 27.10 there still may be problems with some broken search results, but they will be fixed during the day. Also some of the background installations to allow nicer math equations and saving collections as pdf are done today, but they shouldn’t affect LeMill use. Small slowdowns may occur when some of the servers are restarted. I will comment here on how things are proceeding.
We have finally a spot to do our much needed upgrade! It will require taking the service down to safely upgrade all of the resources without breaking references or having other unintended consequences. We’ll try to put the service back on as soon as it is safe to do so, but there may still be some weird behaviour while the less critical upgrades are running.
Upgrade mentioned in previous post, originally planned for 28.9-29.9 is postponed to 10.10-11.10. The upgrade didn’t happen because of unprecedented long network outage in TaiK (Helsinki) which disconnected the name server that connects the address http://lemill.net to correct IP-address and also disconnected both servers where our development code is hosted and servers where LeMill-blogs are hosted. To avoid such incidents in the future, we have changed our name server provider.
We will postpone the upgrade untill Estonian LeMill competition is finished, as we don’t want you to suffer any more outages before the deadline. In the mean time, we can make the upgrade even better.
