Sluggish and Poor Performance of the System

As a general statement, I am struggling trying to get our Stake to fully embrase and utilize the many tools that are available on LDS.org. However, when we continue to have days like today, where the calendar will not respond and when it does you have to log out and back in because it takes so long, then the calendar goes down every time you turn around saying it is down for maintenance. No wonder everyone gets frustrated and gives up if things can't respond better than that. I had three Wards calling today complaining. There has got to be fix of some sort, and it is not Firefox or Google Chrome, they or IE were responding today and this was not limited to the calendar, it impacted the newsletter, directory etc.

Maybe no one else is experiencing this problem, but it was and is very bad today.

Unfortunately, Sundays tend to be bad days for the church websites. I hope that gets fixed at some point soon. I, too, have had problems today.

We were experiencing server problems yesterday (Sunday). Our entire team of IT people were and are working on the problem. One of the challenges we face is keeping up with the amount of traffic the servers get as the church grows and the number of members that use their computers and tablets and smartphones to access the church's web pages grows. Thanks for your patience as we work on these challenges.

mevans wrote:Unfortunately, Sundays tend to be bad days for the church websites. I hope that gets fixed at some point soon. I, too, have had problems today.

And tuesday evenings...

LisaAn wrote:Thanks for your patience as we work on these challenges.

For myself, being a non-tech person, it would help me decide if I want to keep trying to load a page or come back later if the server message actually said "we're so busy right now" instead of "down for maintenance," which makes some ask why you would schedule maintenance at the busiest times....

Sounds to me like you need to add a bigger server to handle the demand. In addition I would agree, that the message needs to be a little more explanitory, rather than just "Down for Maintenance". There seems to be maintenance every day. Sundays, Tuesdays, Wednesday are most sluggish, but the other days are running a close second.

It's been explained elsewhere that "down for maintenance" is a message that automatically pops up if a server doesn't respond quickly enough. Perhaps the church uses this mechanism to automatically return a page if a system is down for maintenance. This is better than the user getting nothing. However, they are clearly having some overloading problems on the servers. It may be an unintended side effect that the "down for maintenance" message appears when the servers are overloaded. It's possible that the church's change management processes depend on this mechanism (I have no idea...just making guesses). If that's the case, there may not be a quick fix for changing the message, as they may not have an easy way to distinguish between an overloaded system and one that is truly down for maintenance.

mevans wrote:It's been explained elsewhere that "down for maintenance" is a message that automatically pops up if a server doesn't respond quickly enough. Perhaps the church uses this mechanism to automatically return a page if a system is down for maintenance.

You're correct in that this message is a generalized error screen that is used to replace the standard "404 - Not Found" message. The 404 error message is a server response when a file cannot be found - for whatever reason. Server load is just one in a host of reasons why a file cannot be found.

I added this suggestion to the calendar bug-tracking system. I agree that we need a more descriptive over-capacity warning. By the way, quite a few people are working to address the server capacity issue. This is a priority 1 issue that is being worked on.

mmkids6 wrote:Sounds to me like you need to add a bigger server to handle the demand. In addition I would agree, that the message needs to be a little more explanitory, rather than just "Down for Maintenance". There seems to be maintenance every day. Sundays, Tuesdays, Wednesday are most sluggish, but the other days are running a close second.

A bigger server for sure... and an upgrade to the Firewalls, switches, Load Balancers, Forward and Reverse proxies, the underlying Virtual Infrastructure and a TON more OS's to deliver the platform.

Then.... figure out when your busy times are, spin up the amount of servers and infrastructure you need for Sundays, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights, then spin them down when you are done. Remember to adjust your recipes as the usage changes and capacity increases....

Of course, this is really the North America point of view... remember to adjust for Sunday's all over the World for a 24 hour period of times and the unique country mid-week activity days... Maybe a separate 'Pod' for Spanish, English, then the rest of the languages.

Oh ya... and be at your Sunday Meetings.

-- An unenviable task to say the least

I don't think the recent Sunday outages were entirely due to load. Apparently some web service calls from mobile apps needed some adjustment. But overall, figuring out how to technically support a growing church membership of double or triple the current size is a key priority.

Johnsonth,

Maybe this recent change will impact some numbers, but our conversion rate has not significantly changed in nearly 30 years (in relation to TOTAL Converts), and our birthrate is dropping. I think the MORE dynamic change is anticipating and figuring out who and when the Global Church will acquire Internet capacity among members. You guys know all this stuff.... but membership population growth is more predictable and linear, where adoption of technology is a different scale, I'd guess.