If you visited the site this morning your
experience was not very good and you are probably wondering what happened? Well last night at midnight we started a major update to all four parts of the site: www.asp.net, ajax.asp.net, forums.asp.net, and weblogs.asp.net. We had tested the new sites on our
staging servers, but when the updates hit the new production and database servers we experienced performance problems (not seen in testing) on www.asp.net and ajax.asp.net, but not on forums.asp.net or weblogs.asp.net. We spent the next several hours trying
to fix the problem on the live servers before reverting to the previous site in order to minimize the disruption.
Looking at the site now, you may notice that forums and weblogs are showing the new design. The reason we didn’t revert back to the old design in those areas, is during the hours we were trying to get www.asp.net and ajax.asp.net running, the community was
adding new content to the forums and weblogs. So we were faced with either rolling back the updates to the forums and weblogs and potentially losing over 900 posts, OR keeping the forums and weblogs with the new content and the new design and reverting back
the rest of the site. So that the new content was not lost we chose the latter option, and hence you see a mix of the old and the new design.
We are working on understanding the issue for www.asp.net and ajax.asp.net and plan to roll out the new design on those areas when it is most convenient to do so - and hopefully with much less fanfare that today’s attempt. Once we have finished rolling out
the new design, we will put together an article that looks at how we went about the rollout, what went right and what went wrong. We will include more information about what happened this morning so that you may benefit from our experience.
I apologize for the inconvenience caused with the site being down this morning, and thank you for your patience and your understanding as we work to improve the ASP.NET Web site.
first of all i'm happy overall on performance of the new asp.net forums. one suggestion i would like to share is i've observed number of users logging on weekends is considerably low, in future could you guys roll out updates on weekends if possible. i know
we all need happy weekends [:D].
I'm noticed that I can't read the forums using IE7, it seems to reload the page repeatedly. In Firefox I'm fine. Not sure if you need to know, or even if you already know, but hey ho.
Its so sad to hear that. I am just thinking if you guys can run into such big performance issue what can happen with small sites. How can we optimize and test a site for performance in test server itself?
First of all... it's never nice when implementations go wrong. I have experiance that a few times myself, and that is very stressfull and never a plesant experiance... but for me it was (in a way) a releaving feeling to see that me and my development team
are not the only ones that have had to roolback our websites. So for this time, you will not hear any complaint from me. [;)]
Hint, tips and trick of the day:
Well.. you propably already know this, but just a little tip... Me and my development team have spent hours and hours myself looking for that little piece of code that made the CPU on the server go crasy, and one piece of advice might sound like: Use the
StringBuilder and not the 'Str &= "Something"'-thing!
This explanation sounds a bit amateur to me. In a well planned transition you have to account for a rollback and a rollforward with info entered during the havoc. Sql server has that, its called the transaction log.
I really don't want to be sarcastic or snub, but truly, we the lonely programmers look up to you guys, the Microsoft super team, and you not applying your own technologies appropiately is very disappointing.
I still appreciate the sincerity, and it takes guts to come out and admit something like that. I'd probably told my boss that the gremlings attacked us.
I think your comments are a bit out of context. Things happen in the technology world and for you to go and say something like that, It is a bit amateurish. Maybe keeping comments to yourself and not harping on the gentleman and woman that work hard to
keep this site up and running for all of us to use to expand our knowledge and get help in the microsoft technology world. Not to sound snub(as you said) but maybe there is a reason they are working for microsoft and you are not!. Sorry but your post rubbed
me the wrong way....
Peace out folks, yea Joshua is correct things are missed out sometimes its not a big issue we all are human to err is our nature isnt it and i'm sure as i believe the teams behind this site never did anything wrong intentionally. they are supporting so many
users i heard 1lakh or so.
i really applaud what they have been doing though i've few issues which many of us might be having like design etc stuff but they cant customize site for individuals isnt it [;)].
To roll out new software and find that it actually works is divine...
This is not meant as criticism for what happened this morning, and I really look forward to hearing what went right, what went wrong and how you fixed it.
I would also be interested in the site infrastructure, number of servers, configuration, what servers process what requests, and how the database servers are structured.
Big projects always have that little bit extra meat that requires real processing power.
simonmu
Member
94 Points
28 Posts
Microsoft
This morning and the www.asp.net site
May 17, 2007 01:28 AM|LINK
Looking at the site now, you may notice that forums and weblogs are showing the new design. The reason we didn’t revert back to the old design in those areas, is during the hours we were trying to get www.asp.net and ajax.asp.net running, the community was adding new content to the forums and weblogs. So we were faced with either rolling back the updates to the forums and weblogs and potentially losing over 900 posts, OR keeping the forums and weblogs with the new content and the new design and reverting back the rest of the site. So that the new content was not lost we chose the latter option, and hence you see a mix of the old and the new design.
We are working on understanding the issue for www.asp.net and ajax.asp.net and plan to roll out the new design on those areas when it is most convenient to do so - and hopefully with much less fanfare that today’s attempt. Once we have finished rolling out the new design, we will put together an article that looks at how we went about the rollout, what went right and what went wrong. We will include more information about what happened this morning so that you may benefit from our experience.
I apologize for the inconvenience caused with the site being down this morning, and thank you for your patience and your understanding as we work to improve the ASP.NET Web site.
Thanks,
Simon Muzio
Microsoft
satish_nagde...
Contributor
6572 Points
1432 Posts
Re: This morning and the www.asp.net site
May 17, 2007 03:04 AM|LINK
hi Simon,
first of all i'm happy overall on performance of the new asp.net forums. one suggestion i would like to share is i've observed number of users logging on weekends is considerably low, in future could you guys roll out updates on weekends if possible. i know we all need happy weekends [:D].
cheers and congrats again [yes].
satish
ilivewithian
Participant
986 Points
263 Posts
Re: This morning and the www.asp.net site
May 17, 2007 03:32 PM|LINK
I'm noticed that I can't read the forums using IE7, it seems to reload the page repeatedly. In Firefox I'm fine. Not sure if you need to know, or even if you already know, but hey ho.
In fire fox the site looks nice, very nice.
That twitter thing.
vik20000in
All-Star
25882 Points
3993 Posts
MVP
Re: This morning and the www.asp.net site
May 17, 2007 04:00 PM|LINK
Its so sad to hear that. I am just thinking if you guys can run into such big performance issue what can happen with small sites. How can we optimize and test a site for performance in test server itself?
Thanks
Vikram
www.vikramlakhotia.com
Blog
www.vikramlakhotia.com
Please mark the answer if it helped you
januskh
Member
24 Points
6 Posts
Re: This morning and the www.asp.net site
May 17, 2007 08:41 PM|LINK
Hi simonmu,
First of all... it's never nice when implementations go wrong. I have experiance that a few times myself, and that is very stressfull and never a plesant experiance... but for me it was (in a way) a releaving feeling to see that me and my development team are not the only ones that have had to roolback our websites. So for this time, you will not hear any complaint from me. [;)]
Hint, tips and trick of the day:
Well.. you propably already know this, but just a little tip... Me and my development team have spent hours and hours myself looking for that little piece of code that made the CPU on the server go crasy, and one piece of advice might sound like: Use the StringBuilder and not the 'Str &= "Something"'-thing!
Best Regards
Janus Kamp Hansen
Project Manager
Microsoft MSDN Universal Subscriber
http://www.kamp-hansen.dk
willford
Member
7 Points
2 Posts
Re: This morning and the www.asp.net site
May 18, 2007 12:36 AM|LINK
This explanation sounds a bit amateur to me. In a well planned transition you have to account for a rollback and a rollforward with info entered during the havoc. Sql server has that, its called the transaction log.
I really don't want to be sarcastic or snub, but truly, we the lonely programmers look up to you guys, the Microsoft super team, and you not applying your own technologies appropiately is very disappointing.
I still appreciate the sincerity, and it takes guts to come out and admit something like that. I'd probably told my boss that the gremlings attacked us.
folkertsj
Participant
1124 Points
323 Posts
Re: This morning and the www.asp.net site
May 18, 2007 10:27 PM|LINK
Wilford,
I think your comments are a bit out of context. Things happen in the technology world and for you to go and say something like that, It is a bit amateurish. Maybe keeping comments to yourself and not harping on the gentleman and woman that work hard to keep this site up and running for all of us to use to expand our knowledge and get help in the microsoft technology world. Not to sound snub(as you said) but maybe there is a reason they are working for microsoft and you are not!. Sorry but your post rubbed me the wrong way....
satish_nagde...
Contributor
6572 Points
1432 Posts
Re: This morning and the www.asp.net site
May 19, 2007 02:07 PM|LINK
Peace out folks, yea Joshua is correct things are missed out sometimes its not a big issue we all are human to err is our nature isnt it and i'm sure as i believe the teams behind this site never did anything wrong intentionally. they are supporting so many users i heard 1lakh or so.
i really applaud what they have been doing though i've few issues which many of us might be having like design etc stuff but they cant customize site for individuals isnt it [;)].
cheers every 1.
regards,
satish.
Socrates470B...
Member
64 Points
19 Posts
Re: This morning and the www.asp.net site
May 21, 2007 02:11 PM|LINK
To err is human...
To roll out new software and find that it actually works is divine...
This is not meant as criticism for what happened this morning, and I really look forward to hearing what went right, what went wrong and how you fixed it.
I would also be interested in the site infrastructure, number of servers, configuration, what servers process what requests, and how the database servers are structured.
Big projects always have that little bit extra meat that requires real processing power.
Best of Luck
cawooddog
Member
2 Points
1 Post
Re: This morning and the www.asp.net site
May 21, 2007 02:25 PM|LINK
To the ASP.NET Team:
Thanks for admitting even .NET insiders can be human! (Who here has not had a deployment blow-up once?)!
We are REALLY looking forward to hearing the details of the problem, HOW it was diagnosed and HOW it was fixed.
We would love to hear the details of the site upgrade itself and how the interactions led to an error...
This is a great chance to teach the community from a real-life example!
Keep us posted ASAP
Cheers