# On FurAffinity. Where we're going and how we're getting there.



## blueroo (Jan 7, 2007)

This is both a personal introduction and an informational post. There have been a great deal of questions floating around about FurAffinity's performance lately. Many people are wondering why the site is slow, why certain parts of the site don't work, and where our new server is. Hopefully I can help answer some of these questions, as well as other questions that anyone may have.

I am Blueroo, obviously, and I've recently come on board with the staff to help moderate as well as provide technical assistance for the site. This means that not only will I be helping with the servers but I will also be able to answer any site related technical questions you folks may have, to the best of my ability. I am a Unix Systems Administrator of 8+ years and I really enjoy working on complex systems such as FA. My wife, Wicked Sairah, is a prolific artist in the fandom and I am glad to be able to help out in the community when I can. We will be at Further Confusion, so swing by the dealer's room and say hello!

First, I'd like to talk about the current state of FurAffinity. I don't have to tell most of you that we have had growing pains because you have all experienced them first hand. White screens of death, admin mode, and 502s are all the very visible signs of these growing pains. In addition, there are troubles that affect the site even when it is running quickly such as subsystems being offline. The good news is that, even though it may not seem like it, these are good issues to be wrestling with! I will take a website growing pain over broken hardware, hacking attacks, or other bad news any day. There are now around 40,000 registered users on the site, and traffic has increased considerably. We serve over 1.5 million pages every day, and that number does not include images! That our current webserver manages to keep up is nothing short of fantastic. We are busy building a new server and working on a rewrite of some of the most fundamental parts of the site. Both of these things are crucial to being able to support the site traffic we have today and continue growing as we have. But these things take some time, so we have also been focused on coaxing every last ounce of performance from the server we have now.

Although you may not notice it, numerous changes are happening on the site that are helping us handle all of this traffic growth with as little impact as possible. We have added a reverse proxy system which speeds up image serving and helps reduce the amount of memory and cpu used by our main Apache webserver. We have tweaked the disk filesystem to speed up accesses, tuned buffers, calculated how to balance processes, and poured over logs looking for redundancies and waste that can be eliminated. We have looked under every stone and behind every tree on the server to find places where we can make the process of serving FurAffinity more efficient, and we will continue to do so.

Unfortunately, growth is so great that these efforts will help tide us over for only so long. When things get really crazy, the staff are sometimes forced to turning on admin mode to help the server catch up and recover. In addition some of the more intensive systems such as searching, deleting, and nukes are offline until they can be rewritten to be more efficient, more secure, or we feel comfortable turning them on when the new hardware is in place. 

We are currently building out our new hardware! You bought this server for the community with your donations and we are working as quickly as we can to get it running for you. There are some challenges with this process but there is nothing that will prevent us from making this happen, and soon! There is some information being circulated about the new hardware stating that the disk RAID controller is not compatible with our operating system, representing a gross miscalculation on the part of the staff. This would indeed be a huge error if it were true, but happily it is completely false. We purchased a top of the line RAID controller, so new that the drivers for it have not even been added to our operating system's boot disk! This is a challenge, but the staff are building a new boot disk even as I type this and we will be well on our way very soon.

New hardware is fantastic, but we also need new code to make better use of our servers. This new code is the famed Ferrox. FurAffinity is a complex website with a great many features. Rewriting the many parts of the code that runs it is a process that, when done right, takes time, careful planning and testing. There are also challenges associated with organizing coders who are scattered across the globe and have never met. I cannot give you many details about Ferrox right now, but the technical staff will be keeping the community up to date on progress and a timeline for release. We are currently recruiting more programmers who wish to help the FurAffinity community and work on Ferrox, so please contact a staff member if you are interested.

Although things may seem a bit stormy right now, there are people who are dedicating precious spare time from their lives to work behind the scenes to make things better. A great many folks on staff are putting in a fantastic effort and should be applauded. We are constantly monitoring the site, watching for errors and reports from users. We see the problems that are occuring, and we are all the more motivated to fix them and improve the site. Please continue to give us your recommendations and feedback, because you guys are the community and ultimately your voices are the most important! We are thankful that the community is so generous, patient and understanding. I hope we can continue supporting the FurAffinity community for a long time to come.

Regards,

Blueroo


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## blueroo (Jan 7, 2007)

Would you like to discuss this topic? Head on over to the thread below!

http://www.furaffinityforums.net/showthread.php?tid=5629


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