The maintenance should be over. Thank you everyone for your patience!
Changelog:
- The server now uses twice as more vCPUs, as I have noticed that the CPU usage is very high which hangs some processes. I have upgraded FreeFlarum's hosting plan, but I still have the option to revert back. I admit that I am not a hardware person at all, but I don't have much options for scaling from our hosting provider, other than storage space and RAM (which are both fine ATM) - so, the goal is to see if this helps and if it's worth additional 4 €/month. I did some calculations, and found out that the current donations could cover that, so let's try it for now and see how it performs;
- Upgraded Python to 3.11 for performance improvements on main FreeFlarum website (Python 3.11 claims to be between 10 - 60% faster than Python 3.10, which I actually find pretty noticeable on https://freeflarum.com);
- Upgraded MariaDB to 10.11.2:
- Also implemented slow query logging (all database queries that execute for more than 15 seconds will be logged - in case of a degraded performance, I may inspect this file to pinpoint which extension has non-optimized queries and create a new issue);
- Tweaked MariaDB configuration for new setup;
- All forums now use PHP-FPM 8.2.4:
- Adapted PHP-FPM configuration to the new version;
- Updated all Flarum extensions for all forums;
- The (broken) language selector from the main FreeFlarum website was removed for now. I will likely look into i18n later when I have more free time. For now, enjoy a small replacement in a form of an Easter egg 😉
I created a test forum (to make sure new signups work properly) and also had a look at few forums, and they seem to be doing alright (if not noticeably faster than before?). If you notice anything out-of-ordinary, please let me know - your feedback is crucial to me, as I am taking a more hands-off approach to FreeFlarum recently due to my exams and other duties.
Next steps:
- To better and more concretely identify issues with performance in the future, I will look into integrating some monitoring service into FreeFlarum. As more and more active forums are appearing, I see that this is an important step towards a more stable server infrastructure with less downtime. I will set it up this evening (there shouldn't be any if not much downtime), so that I can assess whether these performance improvements are sufficient enough;
- Update mail configuration to strengthen the quality of FreeFlarum emails, so that they aren't marked as "spam" so often (this will potentially unlock the ability to include some long requested extensions that send email in large quantities, such as Follow Tags/Users, etc...). That's for another day though (maybe tomorrow, maybe next week - but there shouldn't be any, if not just a little downtime);
- I will look into proxying all forums through Cloudflare to combat DDoS and spam traffic, if possible. I have noticed that many (Free)Flarum forums have a problem with spam. While solutions found in anti-spam extensions are usually enough to counter bad actors, not every forum has anti-spam measures put in place. Inactive forums suffer the most from spam - the spam counts towards the forum's activity, which means that FreeFlarum will not remove them. On top of that, these forums eat resources that could be invested in other forums. Therefore I think that a global protection for all forums would be highly beneficial, both for forum owners and FreeFlarum. There is a catch though - Cloudflare doesn't allow CNAME Cross-Users, which breaks custom domains, so I'll have to find a way around that first;
That's all for now! All forums are syncying now, but that should be done soon (if you see the "Database password prompt", please fixup your forum at https://freeflarum.com/settings/forum_settings, and it should disappear). Thank you for being patient once again, and remember to let me know if you experience any issues (either here, via Discord Kevo#7590 or email info@freeflarum.com)
