website down?

[espruino-discuss]

Posted at 2015-03-07 by d0773d

Is it just my connection or is anyone else noticing the website going down at random times this Friday and Saturday? I have been receiving the "Bad Gateway 500" message.

[espruino-discuss]

Posted at 2015-03-08 by alexanderbrevig

Bad Gateway and the occasional Internal Server Error.
Glad it seems to be up and stable now :)

[espruino-discuss]

Posted at 2015-03-08 by DrAzzy

This website's stability is a little disappointing, frankly - particularly since you can't upload code with modules in it when the site is down ;-)

[gfwilliams]

Posted at 2015-03-09 by @gfwilliams

Is it forum.espruino.com or www.espruino.com that goes down? And what does the error message look like - is it your web browser's one, or does it look like a basic apache one?

I don't run the forum server (but then problems with it shouldn't affect module uploads). I've just checked the main server though and I don't see any errors logged on it apart from the usual script-kiddie hacking attempts, so I'm not sure why it would have gone down unless it was actually some kind of connection issue.

[espruino-discuss]

Posted at 2015-03-09 by alexanderbrevig

For me, as I stated I got Bad Gateway and Internal Server Error. Sadly I don't remember if I got any content served from the apache. I checked with developer console and inspected http status code (I don't think I got served content).

The thing I do remember for this incident was that Espruino.com was still up even though the forum was down. This has happened about three times since new year, for me.

[gfwilliams]

Posted at 2015-03-09 by @gfwilliams

Yes, I've had 'Internal Server Error' on the forum a few times, but never on the website itself.

I'd be really interested to hear if anyone has problems with the main site though. That's been really solid (for me at least).

[espruino-discuss]

Posted at 2015-03-09 by DrAzzy

I remember at least on occasion where I was only able to continue development because I had local backups of the modules I needed, and could put them into sandbox. It would be a low-cost insurance against that happening again (since it screws over everyone using Espruino when it happens) to just rent an AWS micro instance, run apache on it, and have it sync nightly or whatever against the main site, and have the IDE use that as a backup if the main site isn't working. It's under $10/month using a reserved instance. Or if you know other people who run reliable websites, shake them down for mirroring (since the traffic should be negligible).

This forum has always been unreliable, but that seems to be very common. WPF has multi-hour outages weekly, and 3-5 minute page loads are not uncommon. Arduino's is sometimes agonizingly slow. And Espruino's forum sometimes goes into bad gateway mode. But this is less of a problem than the site itself - particularly since it seems the competition isn't doing any better.

[espruino-discuss]

Posted at 2015-03-09 by d0773d

@gordon I receiving the error while attempting to visit forum.espruino.com. The error looked like the Apache error, but please don't quote me on that because I am not 100% sure.

[gfwilliams]

Posted at 2015-03-09 by @gfwilliams

The forum does seem to have some temporary issues sometimes - unfortunately the company running it has shut down, and it's being kept alive by the owner just because he doesn't want to let people down - it makes me feel bad bugging him about it :)

@drazzy I've had the server for years, and the only time I'm aware it's gone offline so far is when Fasthosts' DNS had a denial of service attack. It's been up, non-stop, for 418 days so far - and the last restart was just to patch it :)

If it does fail I'd love to know what the error is though. I guess the best protection would be to pull modules/etc straight from GitHub - that's an option. I have a feeling that if you can't access the server, you'd probably have trouble accessing any London-based servers as well - so any replacement would have to be in a geographically different place.

[espruino-discuss]

Posted at 2015-03-09 by d0773d

@gordon If you don't mind me asking, how much does it cost you per month/year to keep the forum of the espruino website up and running?

[gfwilliams]

Posted at 2015-03-10 by @gfwilliams

The forum itself is free - one of the really nice parts of microcosm... Hence why I can't complain :) It re-writes links to Amazon, etc so they get the referral payments on any sales that are linked through the forum, and they survive that way. I don't think they make much off us, but they host some bigger forums where they're doing well enough to pay server costs.

[espruino-discuss]

Posted at 2015-03-10 by alexanderbrevig

I thought they were shutting down?
Do you have the source?
I'd really like there to be an RSS feed... (yes, I'm one of those guys)

[gfwilliams]

Posted at 2015-03-10 by @gfwilliams

Well, the company shut down and everything went open source, but David and Matt (who started it) negotiated with the investors and managed to arrange that they'd move everything to a new server and keep it running themselves. They're making enough to pay for hosting, but both of them have gone back to full-time work at other companies now.

An RSS feed should be trivial to do yourself - you wouldn't actually have to change the forum itself either. The forum's pretty neat in that there's a well-defined publicly accessible API that the front-end uses. Take a look at the source for http://www.espruino.com/ (search for getPosts). You could easily stick something on your server that grabbed the most recent posts and put them in an RSS feed.