[ros-general] ReactOS website issues

[Pierre Schweitzer]

Hi all,

This is an acknowledgment and informative email.
Since we migrated the ReactOS website to Drupal, you all have spotted
critical performances issues. We did our best to address most of them in
the following days to ensure smooth browsing on the website.
Unfortunately we could not fix them all.
Even worse, nowadays, ReactOS website faces a kind of "shutdown"
everyday (approximately between 2:45 AM CET and 4:45 AM CET). This is a
really long and critical downtime that affects mainly US users due to
timezones.
Be sure we are aware about it.

Unfortunately, this is not something we can fix from a day to the
following. This is due to our backup policies that completely lock the
MySQL server to ensure consistent backups.
We are currently working on getting this fixed as fast as possible. But
this will require (besides the rest) a two hardware upgrades on our
infrastructure.
Indeed, Drupal stresses our infrastructure much more than old RosCMS.
And we have to fully rethink our web infrastructure and redistribute it,
which we cannot do at the moment due to hardware constraints. Upgrading
our hardware will be in our first steps (obviously, expect downtimes at
that moment). Then, we will finally be able to replicate our MySQL
server to perform load-balancing and prevent shutdowns on backup.

We, the sysadmins team and the website team, agreed on a plan about how
to enhance and strengthen the infrastructure, and thus fix all the
issues we are currently facing. This will take some time, but we are
working together to get ReactOS website back into a decent shape.

Be assured that we are doing our best to make your place nice.
Meanwhile, please forgive us the caused inconvenience.

With my best regards, on behalf of the guys working behind the scene,

-- 
Pierre Schweitzer<pierre at reactos.org>
System Administrator
ReactOS Foundation