[Typo3-typo3org] Hosting the TYPO3 sites

Michael Scharkow mscharkow at gmx.net
Sun Apr 10 21:40:03 CEST 2005


Robert Lemke wrote:

> As all of you know, we currently have a variety of difficulties with
> TYPO3.org. Basically I'd boil these down to the following:
> 
>   a) the technical design for the documentation section and the TER causes
>      too much load, a redesign is neccessary

Yep. We all agree on that I guess.

>   
>   b) the current hosting solution can't cope with this load and doesn't 
>      scale well, at peak times TYPO3.org is partly unusable and the TER is
>      not reachable. We don't have detailed information about the reasons
>      when load is too high or the site fails generally.

What can a hoster do with the current t3.org setup? I think the 
netfielders have done what could be given the current setup: MySQL does 
not scale too well, caching has not been used enough until now, the 
whole T3 installation is quite monolithic and therefor has to do dynamic 
lookups for a) docs, b) TER, c) fe-user stuff, d) mailinglists, e) 
comments and forum-like stuff, f) younameit

If that can be split effectively on multiple machines, with more 
caching, I'd expect a lot better performance. I don't see how the pure 
hosting (hardware, bandwidth) has been a limiting factor.

> 
>   c) debugging TYPO3.org is quite hard for me as I can do it only while I 
>      have contact to someone of the netfielders staff. I currently have:
> 
>        - a shell account to the TYPO3.com server which has the filebase from
>          TYPO3.org mounted into a directory
> 
>      what I definately need for debugging is:
> 
>        - control on restarting the webservers and flushing the accelerator
>          cache
>        - an (S)FTP account for the TYPO3.org filebase
>        - access on the PHP error log and the Apache logfiles

I fully agree, and I think the responsible people should be root on 
"their" machines, since those boxes are not doing anything else anyway, 
do they?

> As you can imagine, I representing the TYPO3 Association in this regard and
> therefore speaking for the community cannot ignore these offers just
> because I think that Jan-Hendrik is a nice person. I can't ignore this just
> because I'm thankful what he did all the years for TYPO3, the lists and the
> websites. 

I don't see why Jan-Hendrik should disagree with this, unless you tell 
people that we move because netfielders sucked (which would be a gross 
lie as everybody knows). It's less work and costs for them, and 
everybody appreciates what they have done and still do for TYPO3.

> I have discussed a lot with various people - members of the T3A, Jürgen,
> Jan-Hendrik, members of the community - and finally have decided to suggest
> the following solution:
> 
>   - keep the mailing lists at netfielders if they really put effort into
>     switching to Sympa or making them controllable via SOAP in a certain
>     way.

The lists and newsgroups work like a charm and I see no reason to 
complain to netfielders. If Sympa is a better solution than mailman, go 
ahead...

>   - Distribute hosting of the different sites instead of having one provider 
>     for all. In particular I'd like to see the following distribution if all
>     parties agree:
> 
>     netfielders: www.typo3.com, edu.typo3.com, gov.typo3.com, 
>                  news.typo3.org, typo3.netfielders.de
>     ELIOS:       bugs.typo3.org, association.typo3.org, wiki.typo3.org
>     punkt.de:    all remaining *.typo3.org, demo.typo3.com, 
>                  lists.association.typo3.org

Is this an arbitrary suggestion, or does stuff that belongs together 
move to the same hosts? I see that the non-t3-powered stuff is hosted at 
elios, but why association.*? And why lists.association at punkt.de?

But generally I welcome splitting up stuff (into really separate 
installations please!) because it reduces points of failure and we can 
split administrative and content responsibility.

> Now I ask you to give me answers and your opinion to the following
> questions:
>   - Do you agree with this decision?

Yes.

>   - Should anyone else be asked before taking this decision? We need some
>     really trustworthy people and a quick and future-proof solution at the
>     same time.

I think the only really future-proof thing IS splitting up hosting 
because hosters will stop their support, hardware will break, and 
therefore we should be worried about replacing things quickly instead of 
arguing about the trustworthiness of some or another company offering 
support.

TYPO3 has become too big to handle for Kasper alone, for netfielders 
alone (given that they probably have other things to do for a living 
;)), and this is actually a good thing for an open source project.

Greetings,
Michael



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