Okay, background first. I am a moderator for a fanfiction site using 2.0.7. We have a database with over 1000 stories and over 500 authors. Extended downtime would be a real problem for us.
For those of you with an existing database and a lot of impatient users, how do you do your upgrade? My concern is that if we were to upgrade, there would be snags and glitches because of the modifications that have been made along the way. We can't afford the extended downtime to fix error after error (if the site's down for even an hour or two at the wrong time of day, you're talking tons of e-mails).
If the database were smaller, my personal suggestion would be to make a duplicate of our original install and upgrade THAT to 3.3, so if there were glitches you could work through it without the users experiencing the downtime. However, merely replacing the original with the upgraded duplicate wouldn't work, because of the loss of changes--so you'd have to then install 3.3 on the original and fix the glitches again (which would be easier, since you'd know what they were/how to fix).
That just seems awfully complicated, not to mention the fact that you're talking about taking up a lot of extra space with the database being copied.
Is there an easier way?
URL to your eFiction: http://www.mickiclark.com/efiction33
Version of eFiction: 3.3.1
Have you bridged eFiction, if so with what?: SMF
Version of PHP:
Version of MySQL: MySQL 4.1.14
You should try to upgrade a test if that would make you more comfortable. You should try it on a different database though, in case you upgrade the real one by accident. Read all the boards and see what problems you could go into before you start.
When I upgraded my site, I just went and did it. Around 3-4 AM was the time the least number of people were on.
I posted messages everywhere on my groups and in the news of the archive before hand, telling people that it was going to be down while we were upgrading.
I upgraded my skins ready to work before I upgraded (the skin changes from 2.7 to 3.3 can cause old skins not to work) and had at least one skin that was sure to not have any problems in case the others did (skin comes with download). I think I tested the skins on another eFiction 3.0 site so I knew they were going to work. Of course, they didn't all actually turn out the way I planned and were on the other site, so I just had messed up skins at first.
The site looked messed up for a little while, but I stayed at my computer until it all was okay and fixed. I don't think we had a maintenance mode yet back then, so people could still use the site. I just made sure that I had enough time and skills to fix the major things so that the site would be usable.
And of course, I had a backup of the database before I tried in case it didn't work.
If you have a table prefix in your database for the eFiction tables, I recommend that you wait for the next release, as this one seems to have a problem with prefixes. No, I don't know when that will be.
You could try deleting most of your review, story and author tables if you're worried about a big duplicate test database taking up too much room. Pick an early date for your archive that only had 100 authors, and delete everything that was created after that in the duplicate. There might be problem with that that I don't know about (like series and challenges), but maybe not.
Whoever said nothing is impossible never tried slamming a revolving door.
url: https://www.potionsandsnitches.org/fanfiction
php: 7.4.33 msql: 5.6.51-community GPL
efic version: 3.5.5 latest patches: yes
bridges: none mods: challenges, tracker, story end, beta, word
Thanks for your opinions.
Realistically for us, the best time to upgrade is first thing in the AM or in the middle of the night like you did, since most of our users are in school all day and still have bedtimes. 🙂 Most of my concerns lie with incompatibility issues--i.e., if X has been installed, left on, et cetera, will the upgrade go through? That's why I was wondering if it wouldn't just be easier to do a duplicate rather than haggling for hours with problems and then possibly experiencing a long downtime.
What I think, though, after installing and uninstalling 3.3 a few times playing around with things (and reading a bunch of upgrade error threads), is that we would probably be okay if we took care of the skins and then just turned a lot of things *off* just in case. I'm going to flip through the forums again to see if I can make a specific list of things to avoid.
I honestly don't know if there are prefixes installed, since I didn't do the install and don't have access to the server to look & see. I do know there have been a lot of small modifications made here and there. I also know that they tried to do an install once before and it "crashed," but I don't know anything more specific than that. That's basically why I'm trying to figure things out--to see if there's a solution someone missed. EDIT: GRRR. They do have prefixes.
Anyway, thank you again.
Edit: I downloaded 2.0.7 onto my site (www.mickiclark.com/efiction207/index.php) and upgraded it (after giving it the same settings as our existing 2.0.7, including the prefixes). It installed fine, and appears to be running fine--no glitches as of yet. I am going to assume they just didn't upload the whole thing last time or possibly deleted the wrong file when cleaning up after the install? Anyway, thank you again for your advice. I'm going to mark this answered.
URL to your eFiction: http://www.mickiclark.com/efiction33
Version of eFiction: 3.3.1
Have you bridged eFiction, if so with what?: SMF
Version of PHP:
Version of MySQL: MySQL 4.1.14
If you have a test machine available, I suggest you revert it to version 2.0.7, backup your production database, restore the backup to the test machine, then try upgrading the test machine.
Many of the problems people encounter upgrading is due to their data not being "clean" due to bugs / missing consistency checks in the older versions they have been running. If it works ok, it should give you confidence for your real upgrade.
