Deano’s on a mission

[#1]

As stated previously, one of my primary goals is to get all webpages (Workplace & Portals) operating in less than 2 seconds (at peak). For too long have we lived with a slow and unusable system. Enough is Enough! I've just spent 2 hours 48 mins working 3 letters today (yes I am slow) and I was amazed at how much ***** many of you guys go through. I mean how can one be expected to service a customer with a quality response in 5 minutes if the systems themselves require 15 minutes to operate. As the specials once sang "Its all a load of B*ll*cks and B*ll*cks to it all!" Well I've had enough of it. And I'm making a new rule. If something is seriously BAD and causing serious amounts of PAIN and nobody is listening to you - I want to know about it. Give me an ear ache! ***** me off! (because if your [-Censored-]ed off bet your bottom dollar the customer is too..) Now, this stuff ain't going to get fixed over night but I NEED to know where the main focus areas MUST be otherwise this will last too long. I'll be reviewing the NADS next week and could do with pointers at which ones are CRITICAL. If you've shouted about something before and its fell on deaf eyes - shout at me. I'm WILLING and ABLE to do the task that you think is [-Censored-]s and make my own mind up and get something done if I agree with you. Right now we have a number of initiatives under way which will make things "faster" but this is only part of the solution. We need to make things more "effective" and ultimately more "useable". OK, Whats the stuff that going to help make stuff faster? DB Upgrade ========== The kit is now in place, but at the end of the replication chain. Work is scheduled to ensure the new kit is the primary kit by the end of the first week of October. MySQL Optimisation ================== We have now booked (Nov 1st) one of the guys who helps write MySQL to come in and spend some time with the platform team / DBA's to talk them through MySQL optimisation and performance tuning. Another session has a placeholder in for December for Design / Architecture optimisation. More will be organised for the new year. I expect this information to filter down to everyone who was to understand more about MySQL and make it more effective. Workplace / Portal Servers ========================== Were on task to replace the MXCores with new Sun kit and re-introduce the current MXCores as Workplace servers so that workplace and the portals are segregated. Customer Details Page ===================== The new customer details page is code complete and goes into code review over the next 2 days. It then goes into QA on Wednesday 5th September and will be rolled out the week beginning 11th September if QA passes it off. It will be rolled out in a "slow burn" manner where you will be able to choose the current screen or the new screen and we will run it like that for a number of weeks before we make the new customer details page the default. Share Admin / NFS ================= Were currently splitting some core functionality for the portals and email from the NFS platform. We expect this to speed up the portals and they will no longer have to contend with email read / writes on the same hard disks. This started yesterday and is continuing this week. Once the email is on the new Sun kit, we should see the true benefit of this work. Streamlined OS =============== Were continuing to add to the information centre over the next couple of weeks so that we can finally remove the departmental home pages and the main page so there is less "clutter" and more useful information in the system. We'll then introduce the new header after the customer details page has been successfully rolled to live. PHP 5 Upgrade ============== Were going to do it soon! The QA schedule is obviously busy right now what with all of the CSC improvement items going through it but we'll be looking at how to make this happen next week. Filestore ========= Were replacing PIT which is the No.1 culprit of brining filestore to its knees on a regular basis. Once this has been replaced by a DB driven version and not and NFS filing system, filestore will work fine. Document Servers ================ The servers are now in and the Wiki's are in place - documentation will start to be moved over in a phased approach from next week. WPMT docs will be the first as they are probably the easiest to migrate and will give us a test bench to work against. Great - thats all stuff to help speed it up, but what we going to do about making it useable. Glad you asked! First - I'm going to be doing most if not all of your roles over the coming weeks and months. I'm going to be feeling the pain your going through and understanding what your talking about (yes - sometimes I just don't get what people are saying to me). Then were going to decide how BEST to get it fixed. I not averse to outsourcing simple tasks (like with have done with the shop, our SEO /SEM campaign, the service status tool etc.) if it makes sense. So. how many people are going to take me up on my offer? If your new and you don't know who I am. Well I sit over at TB but am regularly around at IH, I can be contacted on jabber under "Dean Sadler". And what do I do? Well I do this 🙂 thanks for listening - now start talking Dean