Project:Maintenance/042025

Maintenance Log

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Be sure to review 4-13-25 for recent changes due to the site migration.

4-13 notes: Closing the old kenshiDB droplet and consolidating to the new updated server was really helpful. Lower cost, easier DNS, future assurances of uncomplicated communication between the sites, opportunities for unified auth and other API elements. It's great and bodes well for future development. The next two weeks are primarily a rollout of systems in testing. Database connection of the file storage & archive and expansion of the site's API capabilities. Stay tuned...

4-14 notes: Adjusted jobs queue, some minor elements of PHP config & other cache settings. Getting a solid sense where the heavy loads are.; Starting a comprehensive log analysis for the next 72 hours to review access, notices, warnings, errors, etc. Generally speaking this is for the sake of ensuring all set values match expected behavior. The updated jobs runner should mesh well with the current PHP config.

4-15 notes: Looking into recent release of MediaWiki 1.43.1. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Release_notes/1.43; Expect downtime -- I'll be experimenting with finding the best way to conduct minor version upgrades.; Updated to 1.43.1. Monitoring.

4-16 notes: It's difficult to describe the sea change in terms of performance and behavior. 1.43.1's update process also included touching extension versions (SMW brought up to 5.0.1). Keeping an eye out for non-functional site features. The 1.43.0 version will be permanently retained for posterity's sake.; Disabled file caching to disk in favor of other strategies and avoiding overlap with recent changes.; Reviewing MariaDB response times. Small tweaks to address particulars in slow log.; Looking into Varnish and advanced nginx configuration.; Full scrape of community resources insofar as reasonably possible. Discords, Reddit, Steam, any modding resource & vetting for viability of use.

4-17 notes: Working on sandbox server...

4-18: Kernel update and general apt review. Purging old configs and removing some overly redundant logging due to improvements elsewhere.; MariaDB & PHP behaving rather nicely the last few days. Creating a master configuration file for all customized configuration elements of the server.; Improvements to the jobs queue and specifically foregoing disk-based file caching. Finding APCu runs best with full priority.; While last month the goal was 99.9% daily uptime, this month's goal of cool runnings has also been achieved. It took quite a lot of fiddling with memory pools, process management, request timeouts, cache choice and balanced resource allocation to get out of the trenches of analysis. Incidence rate of warnings and errors has diminished to negligible aside from the expected taxing parser calls and upper end of job stacking within the window. It doesn't just look fast, it is!; That said, I'm considering the final jump up the droplet chain that I'm able to make in order to really drive home the PHP handling. Everything about a wikisite boils down to PHP performance. Assuming the server isn't misconfigured you can either throw hardware at it (and pretend it's not happening) or (also) set up Varnish (and make it stop happening because Varnish does all the juggling instead). Both are viable and worth considering. Varnish is slightly harder to implement. :/; The focus is shifting away from performance concerns thanks to some of the critical changes made over the past week. Security, authentication (OAuth), working e-mail, API extension and database management (for ongoing work on the file storage and map) will take center for the remainder of the month. This stage is preliminary to content-oriented additions to the site. While UI and styling are not my forte they're utterly necessary topics for personal exploration. I can't simply roll something I don't understand out - I'm already doing enough of that with the wiki. :D

4-19 notes

3 week plan in place to learn & explore the following

Varnish + Memcached sandboxing and testing
Deep dive on Nginx & PHP optimization
Total (Maria)DB effective execution & automation
HTTP, SSL, DNS, Auth & Session request structure
Complete CSS and (Citizen) skin analysis (NO Tailwind)

The above covers and touches upon most of the remaining pressing topics for wiki-running. More to explore with things like Pywikibot, helpful cron jobs, pushing complexities to services/daemons and making a cohesive activity analyzer (that dashboard I've mentioned).

4-20 notes

Thorough backups of the server contents, configs & wiki database. 4-20 marks the checkpoint for satisfactory operation. Lots more to do but it's a good milestone.
Removed all remnants of 1.43.1 and experimental packages from previous weeks. Reclaimed about ~4GB of space.
Optimization is sliding down the priority scale. I'll need to move towards testing site functionality to truly know how much stress the site can endure.