By tvn on

As you know, the Drupal.org D7 upgrade went live last week. The deployment itself went as planned, without major complications. In the past few days however we are experiencing problems with the Drupal.org performance.

There are a few reasons for that:

  • Hardware - Faulty networking (a spanning tree loop) on the OSU OSL private network caused our downtime on Monday. This has been mitigated for now and a faulty switch is being replaced. We are watching for any additional issues.
  • Software performance issues - These are related to the upgrade. Though we ran through a fair amount of performance tests before launch, due to difference in configuration of staging and production servers, we were not able to catch all the problem places.

Stabilizing the performance of the website, as well as fixing critical and major functionality issues is our absolute priority for the next few weeks. We will work on those issues as quickly as possible, however we are still very much resource constrained and so it will take time.

How are we going to prevent similar situations in future?

Resource constraints (namely having 2 staff on tech team) is the biggest reason why we can’t address these issues as quickly as we’d want. The Drupal Association is planning a big shift in focus on the Drupal.org in 2014, part of which will be bringing more technical staff on board. The two very first hires in 2014 will be a DevOps engineer and a Junior Developer. Later in the year we are also looking to add a QA engineer to the team. These hires should help us increase our speed in addressing situations like this one. If you’re interested in the full hiring and program plan for Drupal.org, we will be releasing the 2014 Leadership Plan and Budget for the Association after it is approved, hopefully after next week’s public board meeting. Watch Drupal Association blog for updates.

What about Usability Issues?

We know there was also a fair amount of feedback regarding usability of the issue queues. While we totally hear you, we just don’t have any bandwidth to start addressing those right now. Our current priority is making sure Drupal.org is stable and all critical/major issues are fixed. Until then, we are reviewing your requests and will begin responding to them as soon as possible.