At 9:00am UTC yesterday we disabled access to the pages under the ARC community on opensolaris.org to see if that would improve the stability of opensolaris.org. In the preceding week we were at times having to restart the site every 20-30 minutes, since this change yesterday there have been no restarts and the resource demands of the application have been significantly lower.
We have also gathered information that help us understand why the behaviour of the application is so pathological, and the load imposed by making the ARC cases available on OSO is a significant factor. The mechanism by which the script on sac.eng uploads case information to the site is also a significant contributor. The script mimics an interactive user, and the process of saving and re-indexing pages is particularly hard on the application. We therefore will be leaving the ARC section of the site disabled until we have an alternative mechanism for providing ARC case data externally. To leave it enabled would lead in a very short time to total unavailability of the entire site. We anticipate that providing this alternative will take 1-2 weeks, and it is our highest priority to get this in place as quickly as possible. Whilst the ARC community is important, it is only one of the communities on OSO and we have to balance the inconvenience of the ARC cases being temporarily unavailable against the consequences of entire site being unavailable. We are in the run-up to the OGB elections with the concurrent constitutional changes, and it is critical that the site remains available over this period - we hope you'll agree the choice is clear cut. As a temporary workaround during this period, we suggest that a repository is created on src.opensolaris.org and that the materials for any ARC cases that are undergoing review are placed there. Whilst this clearly won't provide access to existing ARC cases, it will still enable the community to participate in the ARC process. Apologies for the inconvenience, please bear with us whilst we address the issue as quickly as we can. -- Alan Burlison --
