http://thekop.liverpoolfc.com/service/displayKickPlace.kickAction?u=29856046&as=173471 Most Recent Submissions from SystemsTeam on The Kop Tue, 16 Aug 2011 22:34:57 GMT Tue, 16 Aug 2011 22:34:57 GMT reportedposts@liverpoolfc.tv (lfcAdmin) reportedposts@liverpoolfc.tv (lfcAdmin) KickApps Feed Builder 2011-08-16T22:34:57Z 2 http://thekop.liverpoolfc.com/service/searchEverything.kickAction?as=173471&includeVideo=on&includeAudio=on&includePhoto=on&includeBlog=on&sortType=recent 0 http://thekop.liverpoolfc.com/_Infrastructure-and-Change/blog/5040928/173471.html The following is adapted from a forum post from one of our Developers and covers (in brief) how the site infrastructure works and the sort of work we are performing to maintain and improve the situation. Hopefully it’s of interest: ------------------------------------------------- In a rough summary the site infrastructure is (working inwards): * Global CDN - with nodes covering Europe, Asia & Americas* Load balancer to distribute any non CDN load between VM's in our hosted solution* Multiple VM's hosted on dedicated Host boxes* Dedicated Database boxes* Dedicated storage/filer boxes* Servers themselves all run Red Hat versions of Linux* DB servers run Oracle (which is being phased out) and MySQL (which is being phased in)* For web serving most of the web servers are frontend with Nginx running as a reverse proxy to Apache. Both Nginx and Apache have the ability to run PHP. Apache standard php. Nginx php-fpm (fastcgi)* On the servers we use various caching layers. Static files, Memcached and MemcacheDB All in all it is a pretty complex set-up. One of the important things to realise is that all of it is relatively new (last 2 years or so) - some parts are much more recent and it is always growing and changing to suit the ever growing needs of the Club and allow us to cope with ever increasing traffic.  To highlight some of the recent changes, the CDN, for example, was replaced in  March and Nginx was installed during July. The additional features and capability have opened new options for us - but also new bugs and we have to ensure they various elements interact with each other correctly so content is still delivered/updated in a timely and usable way.  We do our best to ensure these things run smoothly but change always introduces risk.  The aim is that you notice as little disruption as possible. To be clear we are not trying to maintain the status quo, we are working and aiming to make the entire website more dynamic and more interactive. This goes for specific functionality like this year’s Membership form or the Season Ticket Waiting List areas all the way up to coping with ideas that are only in the very earliest stages of discussion at the Club and will not be built for several months.We are also balancing the new functionality against ensuring the existing structure can cope with ever increasing traffic.  This time last year, our record for page impressions in a month was 55 million.  Last month we hit 116 million.  We are currently on track for a billion page impressions during 2011, over double what we saw in 2009.  As you can imagine, this is something that we do spend a lot of time working on and investigating. Huge amounts of this goes on behind the scenes and are part of the long road to improvement. I personally have maybe 1-2 solid months of work to complete which no one apart from my direct colleagues will ever know has been done - but they will make massive differences to the ability of the servers to cope under high load. I hope that satisfies the geek in some people a little bit! The following is adapted from a forum post from one of our Developers and covers (in brief) how the site infrastructure works and the sort of work we are performing to maintain and improve the situation. Hopefully it’s of interest: ------------------------------------------------- In a rough summary the site infrastructure is (working inwards): * Global CDN - with nodes covering Europe, Asia & Americas* Load balancer to distribute any non CDN load between VM's in our hosted solution* Multiple VM's hosted on dedicated Host boxes* Dedicated Database boxes* Dedicated storage/filer boxes* Servers themselves all run Red Hat versions of Linux* DB servers run Oracle (which is being phased out) and MySQL (which is being phased in)* For web serving most of the web servers are frontend with Nginx running as a reverse proxy to Apache. Both Nginx and Apache have the ability to run PHP. Apache standard php. Nginx php-fpm (fastcgi)* On the servers we use various caching layers. Static files, Memcached and MemcacheDB All in all it is a pretty complex set-up. One of the important things to realise is that all of it is relatively new (last 2 years or so) - some parts are much more recent and it is always growing and changing to suit the ever growing needs of the Club and allow us to cope with ever increasing traffic.  To highlight some of the recent changes, the CDN, for example, was replaced in  March and Nginx was installed during July. The additional features and capability have opened new options for us - but also new bugs and we have to ensure they various elements interact with each other correctly so content is still delivered/updated in a timely and usable way.  We do our best to ensure these things run smoothly but change always introduces risk.  The aim is that you notice as little disruption as possible. To be clear we are not trying to maintain the status quo, we are working and aiming to make the entire website more dynamic and more interactive. This goes for specific functionality like this year’s Membership form or the Season Ticket Waiting List areas all the way up to coping with ideas that are only in the very earliest stages of discussion at the Club and will not be built for several months.We are also balancing the new functionality against ensuring the existing structure can cope with ever increasing traffic.  This time last year, our record for page impressions in a month was 55 million.  Last month we hit 116 million.  We are currently on track for a billion page impressions during 2011, over double what we saw in 2009.  As you can imagine, this is something that we do spend a lot of time working on and investigating. Huge amounts of this goes on behind the scenes and are part of the long road to improvement. I personally have maybe 1-2 solid months of work to complete which no one apart from my direct colleagues will ever know has been done - but they will make massive differences to the ability of the servers to cope under high load. I hope that satisfies the geek in some people a little bit! Wed, 23 Nov 2011 20:31:26 GMT http://thekop.liverpoolfc.com/_Infrastructure-and-Change/blog/5040928/173471.html SystemsTeam 2011-08-16T22:34:57Z The Kop The following is adapted from a forum post from one of our Developers and covers (in brief) how the site infrastructure works and the sort of work we are performing to maintain and improve the situation. Hopefully it’s of interest: ------------------------------------------------- In a rough summary the site infrastructure is (working inwards): * Global CDN - with nodes covering Europe, Asia & Americas* Load balancer to distribute any non CDN load between VM's in our hosted solution* Multiple VM's hosted on dedicated Host boxes* Dedicated Database boxes* Dedicated storage/filer boxes* Servers themselves all run Red Hat versions of Linux* DB servers run Oracle (which is being phased out) and MySQL (which is being phased in)* For web serving most of the web servers are frontend with Nginx running as a reverse proxy to Apache. Both Nginx and Apache have the ability to run PHP. Apache standard php. Nginx php-fpm (fastcgi)* On the servers we use various caching layers. Static files, Memcached and MemcacheDB All in all it is a pretty complex set-up. One of the important things to realise is that all of it is relatively new (last 2 years or so) - some parts are much more recent and it is always growing and changing to suit the ever growing needs of the Club and allow us to cope with ever increasing traffic.  To highlight some of the recent changes, the CDN, for example, was replaced in  March and Nginx was installed during July. The additional features and capability have opened new options for us - but also new bugs and we have to ensure they various elements interact with each other correctly so content is still delivered/updated in a timely and usable way.  We do our best to ensure these things run smoothly but change always introduces risk.  The aim is that you notice as little disruption as possible. To be clear we are not trying to maintain the status quo, we are working and aiming to make the entire website more dynamic and more interactive. This goes for specific functionality like this year’s Membership form or the Season Ticket Waiting List areas all the way up to coping with ideas that are only in the very earliest stages of discussion at the Club and will not be built for several months.We are also balancing the new functionality against ensuring the existing structure can cope with ever increasing traffic.  This time last year, our record for page impressions in a month was 55 million.  Last month we hit 116 million.  We are currently on track for a billion page impressions during 2011, over double what we saw in 2009.  As you can imagine, this is something that we do spend a lot of time working on and investigating. Huge amounts of this goes on behind the scenes and are part of the long road to improvement. I personally have maybe 1-2 solid months of work to complete which no one apart from my direct colleagues will ever know has been done - but they will make massive differences to the ability of the servers to cope under high load. I hope that satisfies the geek in some people a little bit! servers, systems, technology nonadult false Infrastructure and Change text blog servers,systems,technology 2562 11 4.90909 http://thekop.liverpoolfc.com/service/displayKickPlace.kickAction?u=29856046&as=173471 http://media.kickstatic.com/kickapps/images/173471/photos/PHOTO_13752038_173471_29856046_ap_160X120.jpg false 4 1 5040928 29856046 LFC Staff 2695 http://thekop.liverpoolfc.com/_Next-Week-Planning/blog/3607788/173471.html The LFC Systems team was set up as part of the Technology department in June 2010 to give the club a single team to maintain and develop all club websites and systems, both internal and external. Our challenge is to provide solutions for every club department that meets the needs of the Fans, LFC staff and LFC as a business.  We try to ensure that everything we do meets at least one of three aims: Improve the Fans experience. Improve workflow for LFC staff. Support Club revenues. If we are lucky we can find ways to do all three at once. Work comes to us from across the club as either a Project, a Task or a Bug.  As our resource is limited these then have to be logged (in a system called Trac), prioritised, queued and planned.  We try to ensure all departments get a share of our time but inevitably time critical items are pushed forward.  We schedule work on a weekly basis, at the time of writing we have the following planned for w/c 12/05 4 Projects 10 Tasks 3 Bugs Here is flavour of some of the things we will be working on with a brief reason as to why they are at the top of our list: Project - Tour Microsite What - Building up a Microsite (current version at lfctour.com) to support the club’s summer tour of Asia.  Why – Will support the clubs global reach. This is the first time we will have built a non English language site.  Clearly has a hard deadline as it needs to be ready in advance of the tour.  Task - Fixtures Time TBC What – Give the Editorial team the ability to mark a match time as TBC. Why – Been on the list for a while but we want this in place before the summer friendlies are announced.  At the moment Editorial have to mark the time as 0:00 which is not ideal. Bug - Remove ability to re-name folders in Asset Manager What – What it says on the tin. Why – We had an issue last week where images disappeared from the site because a folder had been renamed (thus changing the location of all the files within).  We need to remove the rename option so this can’t happen again. If it’s a good week we will keep on track of the projects and complete all the tasks and bugs.  On a more challenging week we also have to deal with unexpected errors, events and urgent short notice changes.  Its fair to say this week was a challenging one so fingers crossed we have a clear run next week! Michael CrowderSystems and Development Manager  The LFC Systems team was set up as part of the Technology department in June 2010 to give the club a single team to maintain and develop all club websites and systems, both internal and external. Our challenge is to provide solutions for every club department that meets the needs of the Fans, LFC staff and LFC as a business.  We try to ensure that everything we do meets at least one of three aims: Improve the Fans experience. Improve workflow for LFC staff. Support Club revenues. If we are lucky we can find ways to do all three at once. Work comes to us from across the club as either a Project, a Task or a Bug.  As our resource is limited these then have to be logged (in a system called Trac), prioritised, queued and planned.  We try to ensure all departments get a share of our time but inevitably time critical items are pushed forward.  We schedule work on a weekly basis, at the time of writing we have the following planned for w/c 12/05 4 Projects 10 Tasks 3 Bugs Here is flavour of some of the things we will be working on with a brief reason as to why they are at the top of our list: Project - Tour Microsite What - Building up a Microsite (current version at lfctour.com) to support the club’s summer tour of Asia.  Why – Will support the clubs global reach. This is the first time we will have built a non English language site.  Clearly has a hard deadline as it needs to be ready in advance of the tour.  Task - Fixtures Time TBC What – Give the Editorial team the ability to mark a match time as TBC. Why – Been on the list for a while but we want this in place before the summer friendlies are announced.  At the moment Editorial have to mark the time as 0:00 which is not ideal. Bug - Remove ability to re-name folders in Asset Manager What – What it says on the tin. Why – We had an issue last week where images disappeared from the site because a folder had been renamed (thus changing the location of all the files within).  We need to remove the rename option so this can’t happen again. If it’s a good week we will keep on track of the projects and complete all the tasks and bugs.  On a more challenging week we also have to deal with unexpected errors, events and urgent short notice changes.  Its fair to say this week was a challenging one so fingers crossed we have a clear run next week! Michael CrowderSystems and Development Manager  Fri, 13 May 2011 23:13:12 GMT http://thekop.liverpoolfc.com/_Next-Week-Planning/blog/3607788/173471.html SystemsTeam 2011-05-13T23:13:12Z The Kop The LFC Systems team was set up as part of the Technology department in June 2010 to give the club a single team to maintain and develop all club websites and systems, both internal and external. Our challenge is to provide solutions for every club department that meets the needs of the Fans, LFC staff and LFC as a business.  We try to ensure that everything we do meets at least one of three aims: Improve the Fans experience. Improve workflow for LFC staff. Support Club revenues. If we are lucky we can find ways to do all three at once. Work comes to us from across the club as either a Project, a Task or a Bug.  As our resource is limited these then have to be logged (in a system called Trac), prioritised, queued and planned.  We try to ensure all departments get a share of our time but inevitably time critical items are pushed forward.  We schedule work on a weekly basis, at the time of writing we have the following planned for w/c 12/05 4 Projects 10 Tasks 3 Bugs Here is flavour of some of the things we will be working on with a brief reason as to why they are at the top of our list: Project - Tour Microsite What - Building up a Microsite (current version at lfctour.com) to support the club’s summer tour of Asia.  Why – Will support the clubs global reach. This is the first time we will have built a non English language site.  Clearly has a hard deadline as it needs to be ready in advance of the tour.  Task - Fixtures Time TBC What – Give the Editorial team the ability to mark a match time as TBC. Why – Been on the list for a while but we want this in place before the summer friendlies are announced.  At the moment Editorial have to mark the time as 0:00 which is not ideal. Bug - Remove ability to re-name folders in Asset Manager What – What it says on the tin. Why – We had an issue last week where images disappeared from the site because a folder had been renamed (thus changing the location of all the files within).  We need to remove the rename option so this can’t happen again. If it’s a good week we will keep on track of the projects and complete all the tasks and bugs.  On a more challenging week we also have to deal with unexpected errors, events and urgent short notice changes.  Its fair to say this week was a challenging one so fingers crossed we have a clear run next week! Michael CrowderSystems and Development Manager  bugs, microsite, projects, systems, tasks, trac, upload nonadult false Next Week Planning text blog bugs,microsite,projects,systems,tasks,trac,upload 2860 2 5.0 http://thekop.liverpoolfc.com/service/displayKickPlace.kickAction?u=29856046&as=173471 http://media.kickstatic.com/kickapps/images/173471/photos/PHOTO_13752038_173471_29856046_ap_160X120.jpg false 4 0 3607788 29856046 LFC Staff 2695