Choral Public Domain Library

As announced on the CPDL ChoralWiki Main Page, the IT Operations group plans to upgrade the MediaWiki software that runs the ChoralWiki. Currently the upgrade is planned to take place on Saturday, 27 September, 0800-1200 GMT (12:00midnight-04:00am PDT, 03:00am-07:00am EDT, 09:00am - 01:00pm CEST). The upgrade process involves:

(1) putting ChoralWiki in read-only mode,
(2) making a full backup of the entire ChoralWiki and its database,
(3) carrying out the upgrade (hopefully in read-only mode, although it may require taking ChoralWiki offline),
(4) making a full backup after a successful upgrade, and finally
(5) removal of the read-only mode.

If all goes as planned, even during the upgrade users should still be able to browse the ChoralWiki, download files, etc., but they will not be able to do any edits or uploads until the read-only mode is removed.

If extra downtime is required, it will be announced along with progress reports here in this announcement thread. After the upgrade is complete, there may be a period of a few days where some tweaking and adjustments will have to be made by the IT Operations group and the Maintenance and Improvement group at CPDL. A test upgrade of an August 24 clone of the ChoralWiki was recently made on a different site, and most of the kinks were easily worked out, so we are anticipating a fairly smooth upgrade and full restoration of the ChoralWiki with several enhancements for those involved with User Interaction as well as Maintenance and Improvement.

Chuck, for the Transition committee

The up-grading is in progress. The CPDL wiki is now in read-only mode.

Max

The up-grade is complete. Read-only mode is now off.

Max

Congrats to the crew for this important step. Good to see cpdl is in capable hands.

Joachim

Good to hear that maintenance work on CPDL is done.

After the upgrade, I have noticed however a very poor performance of the CDPL website. When trying to perform a search, I always obtain the message "To many database connections. Try again later", which seems to indicate a database configuration issue (IIRC e.g. PostgreSQL has a parameter for limiting the number of allowed connections which is set way too low in the default configuration).

Is anyone else experiencing similar problems?

A large step was made on the wiki SW: from version 1.6.7 directly to 1.13.1.

Quite often, new SW versions are more powerful, but they also ask for more server resources. This case was not an exception: after the upgrading, the server was very slow. Actions are in progress to optimize the wiki configuration. If such actions are not sufficient, further actions can be made at the server configuration level. And, if this is not sufficient yet, there is a powerful server, hosted by a commercial provider, that is already running a "clone" of the CPDL wiki, ready to take over if necessary.

All of this is part of an IT Operations Improvement Plan that is being finalized. So far, we've only carried out two urgent initial actions, i.e., the upgrading of the Bulletin Board from phpBB2 to phpBB3, and the upgrading of the Wiki SW from 1.6.7 to 1.13.1. I think that information about the IT Operations Improvement Plan will be announced in the coming weeks.

Max