Church Sites Bandwidth on Sundays

We continue to see week over week slowness and our outages on Sundays when everyone on is on LCR or using the gospel tools. We have tested multiple things to see if there is a pattern but it looks like we need to up our server capabilities across the church.

We tired all of this and still could not access the church tools and web sites.
- Stake Center WIFI Connected
- Stake Center WIFI Not Connected
- Using Data on personal Cell Phone
- Using WIFI hotspot
- Using hardwired internet in the church building
- Using personal computer at home on Wifi
- Using personal computer at home on hardwired connection

What can we not access:
- LDS.org
- LCR when you can get into LDS.org
- All reporting
- Ministering Roles and Assignments
- Ward Expenses and ability to process expenses

Posting here will receive lots of commiserating from other members. I think many of us struggle with this - sometimes it is fine and sometimes it is completely unworkable. However, the only sure ways to get your feedback to those who have the ability to make decisions on server capabilities are:
1. Post feedback from any church app or any church site
2. Your stake president could bring this up in his coordinating counsel.
No one who visits here has the ability to drive any decisions regarding your concern, but I'm sure the problems are not lost on the Brethren. I sync my Member Tools and Gospel Library apps Saturday evening from home and try to not do so at the church on Sunday. I also don't attempt to stream video/audio at church as recommended.

All of the engineering teams involved are well aware of the situation and working on how to best resolve the issues in both short and long terms. If it was as simple as adding new servers, that would already be done.

You can always send feedback or have your stake president work it up the chain, but realize that neither of those will make any kind of difference in this situation.

scgallafent wrote:You can always send feedback or have your stake president work it up the chain, but realize that neither of those will make any kind of difference in this situation.

I suppose we could try moving church to Monday. [grin]

Speaking as an STS (Stake Technology Specialist), there are many things both hardware and software issues that can go array. I am happy to help the Clerk's in my Stake with any issue regarding connectivity and speed which we call latency and loss. This is where the trouble call should be placed, starting with your STS. Beyond this, Bandwidth is not necessarily the culprit to look at for type of "trouble" call. I've witnessed more than 500-1200 connections on a Sunday connecting with an Internet provider under contract and speed tested on a Sunday with streaming taking place with results of 30/5-mbps work without any latency or loss on TM record. I've also witnessed less than 5 connections (Ethernet connected only) fail from latency and loss with the WIFI purposely turned off using the same bandwidth and provider as I began to troubleshoot. Your STS or A-STS assigned should be using the wonderful tools provided for this calling to offensively rather than defensively look over each buildings latency and loss especially during or after Sunday School when the tech system is most tasked at least monthly where there are no trouble calls. Troubles then can be resolved without users knowledge and we can all enjoy the spirit of the meetings.

my recent experience with accessing church websites has also been somewhat frustrating - long loading times on my home wifi network. i suspect custom dns servers are the culprit for this my issues... maybe the servers are not updating new church website urls

scgallafent wrote:All of the engineering teams involved are well aware of the situation and working on how to best resolve the issues in both short and long terms. If it was as simple as adding new servers, that would already be done.

Thanks for this helpful tidbit of information. It helps to know that people are aware and are working on the situation.

I don't know anything about the inner workings of the systems design at the church, but with scgallafent's comment, I can give some readers a perspective on similar situations at my work:

• In one system, a few services under the hood that make up a product weren't designed to run on multiple servers, so we didn't have the option of adding servers until we fixed some software issues to allow it.
• We've had to do some network redesign for better throughput.
• We've recently been upgrading a system that's been working pretty well for over 10 years with very minimal change during that time. Although it's meeting current demand, we realized that there are bottlenecks that prevent us from supporting increasing demand. In this situation, we came to the unfortunate realization that making it scalable will require us to make a significant investment in the product, so that project has had to go to the highest approval review in the company (and it's still there waiting for approval).

As sgallafent mentioned, the church team is looking at short- and long-term solutions. In my company's situation, the first two bullet points above were shorter-term wins, but the bottom bullet point is probably going to take at least 9 months to fix...after it gets approved.