Dear element14 Community members,
I want to start by apologizing to all of your for the stability issues we have been experiencing on the community for what seems like a very long time now. All of us on the development team know how frustrating it has been. (Literally as I was typing this message, the site crashed and needed a restart). Those of you who have been with us for a long time, since before we migrated to this new platform, know that we have always done our level best to provide you with a stable site, resolve bugs and issues in a timely manner, and communicate openly about what we’re doing and what you can expect whenever there have been problems. My team and I have always taken great pride in the features and support we deliver. So, not having been able to resolve these issues for this long is very disappointing and frustrating to us as well.
Our fabulous community manager, cstanton , has been doing the heavy lifting when it comes to communication about the site lately, but I wanted you all to hear directly from me about where we are and what we’re doing to get things back to how they used to be. We want you to be able to trust in us and the element14 Community website.
What we’re doing: We’ve been working closely with the platform vendor reviewing logs, memory dumps, every line of code - you name it - whenever there is an outage. The vendor has recommended that we switch to an Azure-based cache in place of the previously recommended Service Bus. We will be configuring and testing this new component in our staging environment over the coming week and will get it into production as soon as possible if it proves beneficial.
On the off-chance that change isn’t the magic cure that we’re hoping, we are also running performance tests with individual features turned off to try to pinpoint if there is a specific feature that may be the culprit. We run load tests on all of our major releases before they go live. However, we clearly haven’t managed to replicate the patterns of behavior that you all take in our production environment within our load testing as well as we’d like. That is also something we will be trying to improve going forward.
We are working hard to get the site back to the level of performance you have previously been able to expect from us at element14, and hope that 2023 will give us something of a fresh start. We sincerely appreciate each and every one of you and thank you for your patience and your feedback throughout this difficult transition period on our new platform.
Sincerely,
Christy - Director of Community Development and Platform