Unable to access IMSLP

[Sallen112]

Is anyone else having a problem getting into IMSLP today? The forum site here seems to be fine but not IMSLP. I can access other websites with no issues...

[Notenschreiber]

Me too, Notenschreiber

[Sallen112]

Do you know what is going on?

[Carolus]

Yes, it's down. Feldmahler knows. I noticed some performance issues with certain servers yesterday. Some recordings would not load in order to play, for example. We've been getting a massive number of uploads lately so I wonder if things are lagging in terms of being distributed to the different servers (so the load and demand doesn't all congregate on the main one). We're approaching 300,000 files now and we have to consider that the future holds numbers in the millions as things are being digitized with greater frequency now than ever before. There is also considerable linking between IMSLP and various sites like Wikipedia, RISM, various libraries, etc. - more than ever before. It all adds up, I suppose. Hopefully it will be up again shortly.

[Sallen112]

I can definitely see this site growing to the millions in the number of uploads in the next 10 years at the rate of the number of contributions. For the sake of the servers, should there be a limit on the number of uploads per day so the servers have time to process the uploads? I mean if the rate of uploads don't slow down over, more of these outages might occur.

[Sallen112]

IMSLP is back up!

[Sallen112]

Is IMSLP down for everyone again?

[Carolus]

I just noticed as well. I was in the middle of an edit at 2:28 PM CDT when it went down.

[Massenetique]

I just noticed as well. I was in the middle of an edit at 2:28 PM CDT when it went down.

Any word on the cause of these recent server issues?

[Carolus]

Not sure. There were over 170 uploads when I started work. This is not wildly heavy but almost double of what is typical at this time of year. Most of those today appeared to be Sibley items - which have never been a problem in the past.

[Massenetique]

There were over 170 uploads when I started work.

Do you mean for copyright review? Does a backup there cause problems?

[Carolus]

Yes, since you tag your own uploads whatever you put up would be in addition to this. I still don't see why that would cause a backup problem. If it was up to a thousand or so, maybe. None of the files I saw appeared to be massive in size either.

[Massenetique]

Haven't uploaded anything since Wednesday. If it would help, I can devote some time to copyright tagging. I am off work July and August so I will have more free time.

[Carolus]

I am really unable to say what the reason for this sudden problem is. Summer is normally a time of reduced traffic, so unless there has been some tremendous spike I am unaware of, that is unlikely to be the cause. As you've seen on the Moderation thread, the instrumental category tagging has been lagging behind pretty consistently since WIMA. Copyright tagging is actually being kept up with, and most of what needs to be done in terms of work-flow has to do the what I like to call general clean-up. You are an experienced and expert uploader, for example. There are several others who are also. The things that require the most time are inevitably the inexperienced and less-than-expert uploads - typically from someone who just signed up and wants to add something right away because they're excited.

To give an example, inexperienced uploaders creating fresh pages for arrangements is something that always takes a bit of time to deal with. The files have to be moved to the correct page and placed in the correct order beneath the "Arrangements and Transcriptions" tab, with the level-5 header ("For xxxxx, xxxxx and xxxxx") added so it matches an existing instrumentation category in order to avoid the "Unknown Tag" category appearing at the bottom as it is read by the system. The superfluous page also has to be redirected. If we get about 20 of those in a day, it eats up time - especially in the cases where the uploader gives zero information about the source of their arrangement (Telemann must have composed thousands of Minuets, Allemandes, and the like - to give one example). Then there are the cases where a newbie adds an enormous file and gives zero information about it. We have no idea what it actually is so it has to be downloaded and examined. The vast bulk of the actual copyright review is quite simple - and your being able to deal with your own additions is quite helpful in its own right. As I mentioned on the other thread, we had a lot of Sibley items added today but they've never been a problem before and it was an expert uploader adding them to boot.

[Sallen112]

Carolus do you know if Feldmahler fixed the issue on thursday when the site went back up and did he say what the cause was for the site being down? And is he looking at this same issue again today?