Calendar Offline (again)

As an Exec Sec I rely on the calendar but stability on Sunday's is becoming a problem.

This Web site is down for maintenance.

We're sorry about the inconvenience. Please come back later.

This is the third successive Sunday I have gotten this "Sorry Screen" when I need calendar access.

Any insight, status, or info would be appreciated.

Down for me as well. I am sure Sunday demand is a major issue to deal with for the church sites. I hope the calendar's servers can be beefed up soon to help with this ongoing issue.

This is getting ridiculous. The app relies too heavily on client side code (Javascript/jQuery) and performance is woeful even when it's up and running. What's the point of having a Church Calendar if it's not up on Sunday.

I am pretty sure the church tech team folks don't want the calendar to go down on Sundays either. Regardless of the code used - a Sunday increase of millions of users is a very difficult thing to manage from a IT side.

I feel your pain and agree that something needs to be done.
I guess we will go back to printing 3 months calendar each week before Bishopric meeting.

heyring wrote:I am pretty sure the church tech team folks don't want the calendar to go down on Sundays either. Regardless of the code used - a Sunday increase of millions of users is a very difficult thing to manage from a IT side.

A fair and true statement.

I wonder about the implementation though. As someone who has worked in IT for many years I am always concerned when application infrastructure has to resort to the "sorry screen". Some years ago when load balancers/distributors first came on the market this was their answer to server farm capacity limitations. It concerns me even more when the customer (read: victim) is the Church. There are better solutions than a Sorry Screen.

It is clear that some real APM/NPM and capacity works need done in this case. Spreadsheets, server capacity calculators, and bandwidth estimators just aren't enough any longer.

-Mike Oberle
SE Arizona

clarkhall wrote:I feel your pain and agree that something needs to be done.
I guess we will go back to printing 3 months calendar each week before Bishopric meeting.

I am also hearing concerns from building coordinators and others that use the calendar. Just yesterday we were trying to schedule the Christmas party for our ward and were unable to access the calendar most of the day. I have been promoting the calendar as a means of coordinating but the downtime recently is making it hard to justify.

I suppose wifi in the buildings and all the new tools produced a load that wasn't anticipated. Without knowng the configuration of the environment it would be hard to guess what remediation could be done immediately. I have noticed that just before getting a Sorry Screen that I see Oracle errors in my browser so there are clearly database issues. And what a database it must be!!

There could be other issues. I have been seeing what look like XML tag errors in the Gospel Library content. Ah well, my goal in posting was just to raise the awareness a bit.

-Mike O
SE Arizona

So I'll bump this again since the same problem is happening again today. Well today is a bit different. The calendar is just braindead (spinning cursor, no response).

-Mike O
SE Arizona

moberle wrote:So I'll bump this again since the same problem is happening again today. Well today is a bit different. The calendar is just braindead (spinning cursor, no response).

It's a bit slow, as it often is on Sundays, but it's working fine for me.

aebrown wrote:

moberle wrote:So I'll bump this again since the same problem is happening again today. Well today is a bit different. The calendar is just braindead (spinning cursor, no response).

It's a bit slow, as it often is on Sundays, but it's working fine for me.

I expect response time in Sandy is probably better than here in SE Arizona. The application seems to really struggle when latency is high. If that is a common problem then it is an indicator that more processing needs to be done on the server side (less client side dependency).

If it is bad here in Arizona I wonder how folks are doing further out.

I bought a paper calendar to carry as a backup since I haven't been able to rely on the online calendar. My Bishop has taken to using a Google Calendar since its availability is better.

-Mike O

Spinning wheel happens so often, it makes carrying out ones calling of Building Coordinator very frustrating.

I have discovered if I want to change a reoccurring event, ie., Scout Roundtable, that if I delete the original reservation and start over I am better off. It does not take kindly to change.

j/s

I too am the executive Secratary and have found a work around.
Print 3 month calendar out Saturday night.

Is that a workaround or technical regression?

-Mike O