Hello Everyone,

I'm going to try and make more regular updates to let everyone know what is happening with regards to planelogger.

On 22nd we moved the system to a larger server. This has had a considerable impact on performance, although has not entirely solved our problems. As you can see from the graph below, the number of "slow" requests has dropped considerably, but has not disappeared altogether.

We're getting a score of 84% now.. which is an improvement, but still means around 16% of requests are a bit slow.

We are evaluating various analytical tools to see which will give us the greatest insight, and help us identify particularly slow parts of the site that we can then fine tune and speed up.

Hi Nighthawk

Thanks for your updates. It gives one hope, to be keep in the picture as to what is going on.

Ron

Thanks Nighthawk

This update is well appreciated and help us to understand issues.

Paul

Thank you very much for the update!

HI Nighthawk

There is now a big improvement in the system -- Thank you

Ron

Final update for the month: We've now successfully migrated all of the aircraft images out of the database and on to azure storage. This should further reduce the load on the server by no longer having to serve up images. Hopefully this will provide a further performance boost.

We're still sitting at around 14% of requests being deemed as "slow", something that I'd desperately like to get lower. Lets see how this change goes.

Note: obviously images are used in a few places throughout the site, so its possible Ive missed some pages that need updating. If you spot any broken images, please let me know.

Hello,

I’m getting an error while trying to upload a photograph. Is there a disconnect now?

Hi guys, I’m trying to upload some shots with my logs from various airports but it’s not letting me load the picture. Any ideas . MarkHarropAviation Premium member.

The error I’m receiving:

“ Server Error in '/' Application.

Could not load file or assembly 'System.Threading.Tasks.Extensions, Version=4.2.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=cc7b13ffcd2ddd51' or one of its dependencies. The located assembly's manifest definition does not match the assembly reference. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131040)

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code. ”

Exactly same issue as bosshep. Finally managed to log back in after it wouldn’t let me but still big issues with uploads of shots

Thanks - ive now fixed this error. There seems to have been a conflict on versions on the server which wasn't showing up in testing. Image uploads should now be working.

Images

With regards to the moving images to azure - this has had next to no impact on performance - with a satisfaction score of 86% still. It has however reduced the number of requests being handled by the server - so it may help during busier times, and will provide room to grow, so not entirely a waste.

Service Recycling

I've noticed from the stats that the website process gets recycled quite frequently - the default setting is to recycle after it uses 2Gb of memory (total) - despite being the default setting, Microsoft advises this isnt required on a 64 bit server. I've now disabled this and changed it to recycle every hour. Perf score has now increased to 97.4%!

Our target was to get above 95%, so we have now hit that. There are still some requests that are slow to load, but I suspect these are just slow pages (such as fleet lists etc.). We'll be looking to identify the slow parts of the site and see if there are ways we can improve them, but for the majority of requests it should now be nice and fast.

If you do find a particularly slow loading page, please let me know and we can take a look.

Adverts

Just a quick heads up that we are going to be playing with the adverts on the site over the next few days. We want to find a nice balance between profitable ads and a good user experience. While we experiment, you may find some ads that are out of place and a bit too intrusive - please bear with us and these may be relocated in the coming days. You might find the page content moving around too as we try to fit them in, again bear with us.

Also, if you are premium member, apologies if you see ads, this may happen occasionally while we fine tune things, but rest assured once we're done experimenting you should be able to browse ad free again.

Hopefully we can fine tune things to make sure revenue is satisfactory without adverts that spoil the user experience too much.

Nighthawk,

ADVERTS

These seem to be causing a great deal of problems at the moment for your premium members - see their separate posts. In your last post you mention that adverts shouldn't spoil the user experience too much but they are evidently doing so. These issues need to be addressed if you hope to win more premium members (and certainly not lose any).

UPDATES

In the first post you noted that you were going to try and make more regular updates to let everyone know what was happening with regards to the website. Can we expect one soon? Ideally, I would have thought updates should be made monthly.

WEBSITE MONITORING

How often is the website monitored? In my view it should be daily in order to respond to any issues raised by users.

MILITARY EDITOR

Any news on a replacement?

Conclusion

The site has a great deal of potential but seems to be being held back by the points noted above.

Best wishes,

Swakeleys