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We've set a tentative date of Monday, August 24th to start the upgrade to the New(tm) MDapplicants.com. The upgrade can be previewed on the development server at dev.mdapplicants.com - don't expect what you see on the development server to be bug-free because it's not necessarily representative of the current codebase or database.
This means there will be sporadic downtime on Monday and Tuesday of next week.
This means that some things will be slower. The site is upgraded, the server is not. Some things work at the same speed, but appear slower because they preload completely before rendering through AJAX and JavaScript rather than continuously rendering as data is received. A new server is in the offing, but not quite imminent. We'll be keeping a close eye on the load averages to see how we're doing, but we are fully cognizant that some of the searches take 5-10 seconds and that's generally unacceptable. It's an Athlon 800 webserver with php5 and a Dual Pentium 600 database server running mysql5. We have some room to grow, and we'll be trying to get there in the next few weeks.
One change that we've had to make to help the server out with the database changes is that new profiles and profile changes won't be reflected in search results immediately; static search and school databases are created by background processes periodically to prevent recurrent redundant fetching of information. Just an FYI. We don't have $100 million like Facebook has to make everything instantaneous. And by "we", I mean "I".
An additional change that you will notice when you first access your profile on the new site is that you will now be forced to enter an e-mail address. The new site will allow you to log-in using your profile number or your e-mail address - we are also using e-mail addresses to verify new accounts, and e-mail addresses will be forced to be unique. I'm not a faceless corporation that harvests e-mail addresses to sell, I'm just an EM resident with two crappy servers and a hobby website. If you feel the need to enter some fakey e-mail address to throw me off the track, go right ahead - but the automagical password reset feature won't work for you.
Hopefully this will move forward with minimal hiccups; I expect there will be some, and there are some cosmetic changes that I didn't think were drop-dead enough to hold off launch before my programmer goes to Burning Man.
...
So we're going to try and launch Monday or Tuesday before he goes to Burning Man. Hopefully Monday so we can keep a close eye on it through Tuesday to troubleshoot anything deadly.
All your data is safe, it will just look a little different.
Sorry for any inconvenience. Things may get worse before they get better again.
This means there will be sporadic downtime on Monday and Tuesday of next week.
This means that some things will be slower. The site is upgraded, the server is not. Some things work at the same speed, but appear slower because they preload completely before rendering through AJAX and JavaScript rather than continuously rendering as data is received. A new server is in the offing, but not quite imminent. We'll be keeping a close eye on the load averages to see how we're doing, but we are fully cognizant that some of the searches take 5-10 seconds and that's generally unacceptable. It's an Athlon 800 webserver with php5 and a Dual Pentium 600 database server running mysql5. We have some room to grow, and we'll be trying to get there in the next few weeks.
One change that we've had to make to help the server out with the database changes is that new profiles and profile changes won't be reflected in search results immediately; static search and school databases are created by background processes periodically to prevent recurrent redundant fetching of information. Just an FYI. We don't have $100 million like Facebook has to make everything instantaneous. And by "we", I mean "I".
An additional change that you will notice when you first access your profile on the new site is that you will now be forced to enter an e-mail address. The new site will allow you to log-in using your profile number or your e-mail address - we are also using e-mail addresses to verify new accounts, and e-mail addresses will be forced to be unique. I'm not a faceless corporation that harvests e-mail addresses to sell, I'm just an EM resident with two crappy servers and a hobby website. If you feel the need to enter some fakey e-mail address to throw me off the track, go right ahead - but the automagical password reset feature won't work for you.
Hopefully this will move forward with minimal hiccups; I expect there will be some, and there are some cosmetic changes that I didn't think were drop-dead enough to hold off launch before my programmer goes to Burning Man.
...
So we're going to try and launch Monday or Tuesday before he goes to Burning Man. Hopefully Monday so we can keep a close eye on it through Tuesday to troubleshoot anything deadly.
All your data is safe, it will just look a little different.
Sorry for any inconvenience. Things may get worse before they get better again.
