For the past year-plus, MFGG performance has been pretty iffy. Sometimes it's been OK, but a lot of the time performance has been lacking. I'm sure we've all seen some 504 errors after a particularly slow page timed out!
I've tried a few solutions over the past year, and while some of them helped, none of them really fixed the problem. Until now!
Sean, a good friend of mine, generously gave up a piece of his evening to help me investigate what's causing these performance issues. And thanks to his help, the MFGG server is running much, much better now!
MFGG runs on some relatively old software - software that was never designed to handle the army of bots and scrapers we have nowadays. Some of these bots send multiple requests every second, and MFGG's software was not built to handle this kind of traffic. Sean helped tweak some database engines, adjust indexes, and fine-tune a finicky query. These SQL tweaks combined to make MFGG's performance much, much better.
A glance at the system logs shows almost no timeouts have occurred today. That's a good sign. Of course, I can't guarantee that we'll never have a performance hiccup again - there are still a bunch of places where we can improve performance. I'll continue monitoring MFGG's performance to make sure things continue running smoothly. You can help by speaking up if you notice any errors or slowness.
Finally, Sean is awesome. Tell Sean thank you. Maybe send him some brownies or something.
You can now update your existing submissions again!
In recent weeks, ever since the PHP 7 upgrade, we've been having problems with updating existing submissions. Members couldn't submit updates to their submissions, and QC staff couldn't approve updated submissions. (Submitting and approving new submissions was unaffected.)
I found the problem, and the issue should be resolved now. Please speak up if you notice any other issues. We're still looking into the periodic performance issues, which affect all sites hosted on the server and have nothing to do with the PHP updates. I'm still working on a few fixes needed to get the forums up to PHP 8.2 - they're still on PHP 7.4.
Now that I've resolved the main PHP bug, I'm calling this update TCSMS 1.1! I'm going to keep the mainsite on PHP 8.2 now that we know all core functionality can run on PHP 8.x.
I know these bugs are annoying, but upgrading MFGG's infrastructure is an important step forward that will make life better for all of us.
I've now upgraded the MFGG mainsite to PHP 8.2! It took a few more tweaks to get the mainsite software up from 7.4 to 8.2, but it's well worth the trouble. This upgrade puts MFGG on the latest and greatest PHP architecture, helping us improve performance, security, and stability. It also gives us access to PHP features that older versions lack.
Here's an update on other mainsite technical details:
Performance If you've visited the mainsite in recent weeks, there's a very good chance you might've noticed some performance issues. Maybe a page loaded really slowly, or maybe it even timed out and threw an error. We've experienced those issues too, and we've been investigating the root cause and experimenting as we look for a permanent solution. These performance issues have nothing to do with any of the PHP or HTML/CSS changes we've made - they appear to stem from unusual bot traffic.
Bugs We've noticed some issues with updating existing submissions in recent weeks. If you try to update an existing submission, the page might crash. That's not good. On the QC staff side, trying to approve an updated submission in the queue leads to an SQL error. Uploading and approving new submissions is working fine, thankfully. While people don't update submissions extremely frequently, we're aware that this is a bad user experience, and fixing this is at the top of my to-do list.
If you notice any other bugs, large or small, please speak up! Tell me exactly what happened so I can debug the problem - the more details, the better. The Suggestions board on the MFGG forums is the best place to note a bug.
HTML/CSS updates The original version of the mainsite software is two decades old, so it has used some older standards. If you use a tool like the W3C Validator on a lot of pages, you might get up to a thousand errors/warnings! I've been working on fixing some deprecated code (things like valign, border, and cellspacing) - either removing unneeded code or replacing it with modern CSS.
There is a small chance that these changes could affect the page layout. In some cases, a table might grow or shrink by a pixel or two - I don't think anyone's going to notice that. But it is conceivable that one of those valign properties was needed after all and the alignment is out of whack. If anything feels off, let me know.
Thanks for being patient as we drag TCSMS into this brave new world, also known as "2025".
