When I did this sort of thing (elections news coverage) we scaled up the day before and set thresholds and auto dynamic scaling. Right now actually I do things like this for Black Friday and cyber Monday when billions of credit card swipes take place, but using private cloud. However we needn’t go that far, YET. An easy win would be to put the database on a managed database service like AWS RDS. The web server isn’t usually the bottleneck. The database is. The application server isn’t even to blame because in our app we aren’t doing intensive compute. We are mostly doing database inserts and selects. A managed database will have capacity and scaling completely transparently and you don’t even have to think about this. Amazon just scales the database using its theoretically infinite resources. Hopefully our attitude about cloud computing can change. When I mentioned cloud to Mike Keane in 2019 he said that we shouldn’t bother because we had “sunk cost” into things like HVAC in HQ. Dave AA6YQ also said we should be investing in programmers and not hardware/cloud. I did recommend a cloud database for LoTW in one of the IT infra committee reports. Hopefully we can at least do that. I can almost guarantee that it will alleviate 90% of the post contest crashiness. 73 Ria N2RJ On Mon, Nov 30, 2020 at 1:46 PM Mickey Baker <fishflorida@gmail.com> wrote:
One of the issues David Minster hit on during the A&F meeting corresponded to some posts I made years ago in the LoTW online group.
There is no reason that this system should NOT be running on a cloud-based virtualized server. Even if portions of the design are single threaded, the ability to add processing power (memory, cpu, IO bandwidth) on the fly and in anticipation of these peak workload, is essential and CAN BE DONE QUICKLY without a total system re-write.
System capacity can likely be then bumped up 4x-10x around contest weekends without purchasing gear.
Sticking it on a hardware server in a data center is prudent but not smart with a workload that varies like this.
Corporations do this routinely with workload, such as month/year end closings, trial balances, etc.
I have skills needed to design a plan to do this and will offer, again, to DONATE time to analyze our current state develop a confidential plan.
One of the reasons I ran for this position is that the prior director was clueless about League IT challenges. I know this is one of many, but it is “low hanging fruit” and can be addressed before a design of lotw 2.0 can be agreed upon.
73,
Mickey N4MB
On Mon, Nov 30, 2020 at 1:30 PM Roderick, Rick, K5UR via arrl-odv < arrl-odv@reflector.arrl.org> wrote:
It's backlogged due to all of of the downloads from the CQWW contest this past weekend. It was running 10 hours behind earlier this morning.
Rick
-----Original Message----- From: Minster, David NA2AA (CEO) <dminster@arrl.org> To: Tharp, Mark, KB7HDX (VD, NW) <kb7hdx@gmail.com>; arrl-odv < arrl-odv@arrl.org> Sent: Mon, Nov 30, 2020 12:26 pm Subject: [arrl-odv:31410] Re: LOTW Broke?
I just jumped on to see if I could replicate. Went through ARRL network and cellular network. Went into logs and awards. No errors.
I will forward onto the team in case this is the tip of the iceberg.
David
*From:* arrl-odv <arrl-odv-bounces@reflector.arrl.org> * On Behalf Of *Mark J Tharp *Sent:* Monday, November 30, 2020 1:22 PM *To:* arrl-odv <arrl-odv@arrl.org> *Subject:* [arrl-odv:31409] LOTW Broke?
Third time this morning I have seen this error.
Is it just me?
Mark, HDX _______________________________________________ arrl-odv mailing list arrl-odv@reflector.arrl.org https://reflector.arrl.org/mailman/listinfo/arrl-odv _______________________________________________ arrl-odv mailing list arrl-odv@reflector.arrl.org https://reflector.arrl.org/mailman/listinfo/arrl-odv
-- “Ends and beginnings—there are no such things. There are only middles.” Robert Frost _______________________________________________ arrl-odv mailing list arrl-odv@reflector.arrl.org https://reflector.arrl.org/mailman/listinfo/arrl-odv
