Utopia Developers’ Update 30th September
Time for this week’s Blog from Sean, comments please in the forum as per usual -
Hi everyone,
As Brian mentioned last week we moved into Beta, meaning that the test server is no longer invitation-only, and anyone can sign up. And boy, did they… as of this writing there are 1200 testers active on the server, normally with about 50 people online at any one time. The main purpose of moving into beta was to allow us to collect real figures on site performance, so that we could estimate what needs to be in place before starting Genesis on the new code. This has been very effective, and we’ve made a number of significant speed improvements to the site. Additionally, I’ve just finished upgrading the test server so that its now running on much beefier hardware. Over the next couple of days we’re going to continue monitoring performance closely to see what kind of difference it made.
Unfortunately, there are still a large number of bugs outstanding. A side effect of having so many testers is that we’re now receiving more bug reports in each day than we can triage. By triage, I mean the process of categorizing the reported bug, looking for duplicate reports of it, figuring out if there is really a problem, deciding what next actions to take on it, and prioritizing it. At the moment, we’re at capacity just triaging the bug reports, with little time left over for actually fixing them. In order to move forward, we’re going to concentrate on just fixing known bugs for the next while, and are not going to spend much time processing new bug reports. Because of this, you may find us slow(er) to respond for the next week or more.
The current, over-long, age of Genesis is going to end next Thursday 8th of October. At the earliest, Genesis will be restarted (on the new code) the following week. Having quickly read through the forums, let me say that we intend to improve the look and feel of the site before then. This includes redesigning the mystics pages, reviewing the names and labels used for various things, and tightening up the layout. These visual issues are quite easy to fix.
We’ll provide a clearer estimate of when the next age can be expected to restart next week.
Sean