ForumsNewsSite Availability Oct 2, 2014
Site Availability Oct 2, 2014
| Author | Message |
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Jake Toodledo Founder |
Everything should be resolved now, but for the last few hours we've been experiencing slow performance and intermittent brief periods of downtime for Toodledo.com. The cause of the problem is due to a combination of factors coincidentally and inconveniently happening at the same time. In short, a database backup happened at the same time as a maintenance task which caused excessive load on the database. Our monitoring software attempted to compensate by switching to our backup database, but that database had been restarted recently for a different reason, so it had a "cold cache" and took a while to get up to speed. At the same time, our website appears to have been crawled by a very aggressive bot, which added additional load to the servers.
To prevent this from happening again, we are putting some safety checks in place to prevent maintenance tasks and database backups from happening at the same time. We have also realized that our servers don't have as much computational buffer as we would like to handle large spikes in traffic so we are advancing our plans to upgrade our servers to faster hardware. It looks like we were offline for about 20 minutes with another 90 minutes of sluggish performance. We are very sorry for the inconvenience that this may have caused to anyone starting their workday and expecting Toodledo to be there for them. This is our first major availability issue in years, so it's a disappointing break in an otherwise good streak of uptime. Platinum subscribers will be getting a credit to their account as part of the 99.9% Uptime SLA that we promise. |
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NorthWestAudioCraft |
Jake, why doesn't the Toodledo application cache data on the local hard drive? I'm not the only person whose network connectivity is intermittent. I *should* be able to navigate to the Toodledo website and see the last stuff I uploaded, if my connectivity is broken (which is true about 25% of the time). Also, I *should* be able to add/edit/modify while offline, and then the updates get to the Toodledo cloud when connectivity is restored.
This is how most of my other nominally online apps work, why not Toodledo? |
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Salgud |
Thanks for letting us know, Jake.
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Jake Toodledo Founder |
If you use one of our apps (iPhone / Android) or any of our 3rd party apps that sync with Toodledo, you would have be able to access your data offline when our website was down and made any changes that you wanted which would have synced when you regained connectivity.
Additionally, our Lists and Outlines sections are already capable of working offline when the server is down and we are working to bring this offline functionality to the Notes and Tasks section as well. |
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kevinarth |
Thanks Jake. Appreciate the clear explanation and attention to resolving the issue.
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Mike |
When Toodledo went down a lot of people immediately went to Twitter to find out what was happening, but nothing was posted.
The problem with waiting and posting an explanation here is that if your site is down nobody will be able to see it until it's back up. Just a suggestion, but it would be helpful if, as part of your recovery process, you posted the status on your Twitter page. That would give people enough information to check back later rather than trying every few minutes, which only adds to your network load problems. Almost everyone using the Internet is tolerant of minor hiccup now and then, but they really dislike being left in the dark. |
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Jake Toodledo Founder |
Thanks for the feedback. When we are in the middle of a crisis like this, we are focusing on fixing the site and often forget to take a step back and communicate to users what is going wrong. We'll try to remember to do this if it happens again.
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jesse |
As for using apps offline. The toodledo app on android would start up and then would crash -- wasn't possible to make any changes as the app would stop when i couldn't synch with the server.
Other apps that i use like ultimate todo list on android and taskunifer on desktop allowed editing but no synching but i didn't do anything because i wasn't sure how the synch would work once toodledo finished it's maintance so was scared of losing any edits. so i did a lot of stuff with pen and paper for later processing |
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Jake Toodledo Founder |
The next update of our Android app will not crash if the server is offline during sync :)
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NorthWestAudioCraft |
Posted by Jake:
If you use one of our apps (iPhone / Android) or any of our 3rd party apps that sync with Toodledo, you would have be able to access your data offline when our website was down and made any changes that you wanted which would have synced when you regained connectivity. Additionally, our Lists and Outlines sections are already capable of working offline when the server is down and we are working to bring this offline functionality to the Notes and Tasks section as well. I am unaware of any "third party apps" on Win7 that do this. Can you point me to them? On my Win7 machine running Firefox, the List and Outlines are not available without network access. Do I need to change a setting in FF to do this? Thanks |
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Jake Toodledo Founder |
If you look in the "Desktop" section of our 3rd party tools page you'll see a lit of apps that you can try.
http://www.toodledo.com/tools/directory.php As for Lists/Outlines. I should have been more accurate in my original comment. If you already have the Lists or Outlines pages open in your web browser and then you lose connectivity, you will continue to be able to use Lists and Outlines while offline. When you come back online, it will sync your changes. It is not yet possible to be offline first and then go to Lists or Outlines and have them load up while offline, although this is a planned upgrade for the future. |
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Tech Crone |
Since late yesterday I have been having increasing difficulty getting Toodledo to save changes to the checkbox that shows a task as completed. As of this moment it appears that it is impossible to check the box and have TD save the change. I assume this is related to the problems Jake reported yesterday. I just want to report the ongoing problem and check to see if there is any ETA for when it might be fixed.
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Jake Toodledo Founder |
A checkbox issue is certainly unrelated. My checkboxes seem to be working fine. Can you please create a support ticket and give us more information about what is happening. Are the tasks you are completing repeating tasks that get automatically regenerated? Sometimes this can appear like the task isn't getting completed when in fact it is completed and then immediately recreated.
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Tech Crone |
I'm still having trouble checking tasks off as completed, but it doesn't affect every task, and sometimes after several tries it will let me check the box. The tasks are definitely not recurring--the start dates remain the same and I am getting error messages saying that my change could not be saved.
I'll see if I can find any pattern to this and then submit a support ticket if it hasn't resolved itself by then. This message was edited Oct 04, 2014. |
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