Blog Posts

We are working on an issue where the application eventually runs out of session resources on the database connection pool. We've set minimum connections = maximum connections as a short-term fix so that the pool size doesn't change, because we believe the leak occurs when the pool is resized. We are also working on the long-term fix, which is to put in a JNDI configuration to replace Jive's connection provider. Meanwhile, Jive is investigating a higher-level locking function on the connection. And we are running load tests on an iGate JDBC driver, which we hope to deploy this week for better compatibility with our SQL Server database. We are making these changes because the thread dumps indicate problems with database connectivity.

At the same time, we installed a new community test environment with Tomcat on a 32 win2003 platform. We are configuring that and will begin testing later in the week. If the driver replacement doesn't solve our problem, we will move replace Linux/Tomcat with the Win2003/Tomcat in order to run on a completely different JDBC environment which is more compatible with our Win2003 SQLServer database cluster.

We are also going to reset the system tonight at 5:00am to attempt to make it through the European peak demand.

Rich Text Editor (RTE): We plan to move the JavaScript for the RTE onto our Akamai service. Currently, most of the functionality is in a gzipped JavaScript library that is served from the Jive platform and unzipped by the browser. It appears that IE calls these JavaScript functions before they are fully unzipped, which results in the object not found errors many of you have reported. This problem is worse when the application is running slowly. By moving the files to Akamai, we will be able to serve them unzipped, and we believe this will greatly improve the editor loading issues.

Thank you for your patience as we work through these issues.

We just rolled out a new VMware Communities platform release that fixes some of the top feature issues identified by the community:

• Threaded display mode for discussions. On My Content -> Preferences, you can set either threaded or flat view. Your default is the setting you had in the old VMTN forums; guests always see flat view. In threaded view, all posts display on a single page; in flat view, 15, 30, or 50 messages display per page (see Set Posts Per Page below). In addition, if threaded discussions go more than 20 levels deep, all threads at level 20 and beyond display at level 20.

• View all posts from a user. If you go to on any community member's profile -> Discussions tab, you will see all messages the member posted. Each member's Overview tab still displays just the threads the member started. And we did discover a bug too late to fix: the links in the Discussions tab point to the top of each thread, not to the individual message within the thread. We will fix this next week.

• Set posts per page. On My Content -> Preferences, you can set 15, 30, or 50 posts per page. Your default is the setting you had in the old VMTN forums. This one setting determines both the number of discussions or documents that display on a community homepage and the number of messages that display in a thread (in flat view only).

• Search in this community. The search box will by default search just within the current community (and child communities, if there are any) as it did in the old VMTN forums. Once you've done a search, the results page displays with the advanced options open and the appropriate community and its children selected to remind you where the results are from. If you wish to broaden the search, you can then specify other communities and rerun the search. Tip for Windows: use shift-click or control-click to select multiple communities.

• Legibility tweaks. We tweaked the UI to make community pages and threads easier to scan. Note: To see this fix, you may need to refresh your browser so it loads the new CSS.

• Mark as read. If you click 'Mark as read' in a parent community, it marks the message as read in all child communities as well.

• Blog permalinks. Blog permalinks for guests now link to the proper blog post. Blog permalink pages now display with proper width.

I've updated the VMware Communities Known Issues with today's fixes.

We continue to spec out additional functional and u/i improvements, and we will blog about them here later. Search improvements are at the top of the list.

Meanwhile, we continue to work on reducing the system slowdowns and restarts, which we believe is a key source of the browser and text editor issues some of you are experiencing.

On Friday night Pacific time, we installed fixes to the following issues:

• Caching performance: An optimization to the community manager cache, which improves loading times of community homepages.
• Rich text editor loading: A fix for a condition where in certain circumstances the editor was invoked before it finished loading, which caused it not to display properly.
• Blog permalinks: A fix for blog permalinks, which were incorrect for blogs with multiple posts and comments.

Our monitoring software is continuing to restart the platform periodically following degradation in performance. We are investigating the log files and thread dumps to resolve the underlying issue.

The feature fixes described in Performance Fixes and Feature Status are complete and queued up for deployment on Monday.

We're continuing to do performance tuning and monitoring on the system. In parallel, we are continuing our software development, both in-house here at VMware as well as at Jive. We've got several features and UI changes in the pipeline.

In the shorter term, we are reintroducing several useful features that we used to have in the old VMTN based on Jive Forums that were not present in the Jive Clearspace platform we're now using. These features are in testing and we hope to have them out to you next week. (I hope early next week.)

• Threaded display mode for discussions. This will add a preference to display discussions as a tree of indented replies. People have strong feelings about this, one way or another. For most forums, I actually prefer a flat display, and as an admin, I think flat displays help keep a thread on topic. However, for the intense discussions and the demographic we have here, and because we are all used to it, I think a threaded display is absolutely necessary. It's actually very useful as an moderator as well if we have to delete a message or branch a thread.

• View all posts from a user. This will show all the messages posted by a user in a tab on their profile. Right now, in your profile you can only see the threads you've started, not the ones you've replied to. This is useful to keep track of your current conversations, and it's also useful to get more context about others in the community and what all they're participating in.

• Set posts per page. This is a real convenience function to be able to set 50 instead of 15 posts/page. Right now, the default is 15 and you have to keep resetting it. This will be a preference, as it was in Forums.

• Search in this community. The search box will by default search just within the community you're in, as it did in Forum. Once you're doing a search, you can specify other communities. Tip: you can select multiple communities -- for Windows, use shift-click or control-click.

• Legibility tweaks. We will be tweaking the UI for fonts and colors to make it more readable.

Outstanding high-priority issues that will be addressed, but not by early next week:

• Rich Text Editor. It doesn't load all the time, and is frustrating when it loads. This is the highest priority item for which I don't have a scheduled fix date. Tip: try out the Plain Text editor -- it's faster, and it has automatic spell-check.

• Search. Results are per-message, not per-thread; there is no user filter (although you will be able to see all posts by a user now); some syntax isn't working; search results can be poor in general. Tip: use Boolean syntax (foo AND bar, foo || bar), not Google-style syntax. Also, you can use Google and add the term "(site:communities.vmware.com OR site:www.vmware.com/community)" -- works pretty well. Google still has a mix of old and new pages in its index.

• Front page. We want to simplify the front page and add indications there when there are unread messages within a community.

• Right sidebar. The right sidebar was designed as a way of adding contextual resources to each community -- links to docs, latest builds, kb articles, white papers, security alerts, blog postings from the team. For performance reasons, every community shows the same sidebar, and it takes up too much room on the page. We will address this.

• Favorites/Watches. Have some graphical way in the communities of indicating which threads you're interested in, instead of having to go to your profile.

A fuller list of outstanding issues is VMware Communities Known Issues. I think soon we'll be faster and more powerful than where we were, so we can get back to the business of virtualization. (Oh, and there are some very interesting new community topics and blogs in the pipeline, but that's for another day.)

We changed some network configuration in the data center. The result is that we are seeing improved and consistent performance from our internal monitoring of the VMware Communities application. And performance feels better when we navigate the site as well.

While we expected and announced a 20 minute downtime, some issues with our colocation facility resulted in one hour of downtime. And because the changes also involved network configuration, we were not able to post a maintenance page, so we apologize for that.

Please let John and me know if you are seeing performance issues. Or even if you're not, drop us a line. We always love to hear from you.

More changes tonight:

Akamai: Static content (e.g. graphic files) are now served up by Akamai's edge servers, resulting in faster load times for these elements.

Time Order: Discussions and documents now show up correctly in reverse chronological order on all community pages. This was a bug that was inadvertently introduced on Oct 4.

Markup: The following markup from the old VMTN forums now works:

[code]
code code goes here /code without spaces
URLs in the format url http://www.vmware.com/ /url without spaces
[/code]

Or you can still use the new wiki markup help.

Monitoring Issues

On Sunday night into Monday morning, we had unexpected downtime on VMware Communities. As soon as we realized, we immediately rebooted VMware Communities and performance returned to reasonable levels, but that was after many community members in time zones other than Pacific experienced several hours of poor performance. We had been checking the site manually all weekend, but from Sunday night to Monday morning Pacific, the site was unusably slow. We are sorry for that, especially since we are aware how many of you rely on VMware Communities professionally and personally. We’ve now shortened the acceptable response time for our monitoring system to 20 seconds – if a page loads slower than 20 seconds, we get an alert and will examine system statistics and respond appropriately.

New Build Environment

On Thursday, we recreated our build environment by rolling in a series of performance patches we had made since going live. Recreating our build environment is a necessary step before we can roll out the additional usability and performance fixes that we have been (and continue to be) working on. The build appears to have caused some issues with the order of posts on the various community pages (although the timestamps are still correct). Jive Software is working on identifying a fix, and I will give an update here tomorrow.

Today's Fixes

The advantage of having a new build environment is that we are able today to roll out a set of usability and performance fixes:

Internet Explorer Performance: We replaced the JavaScript-based top menus with CSS-based ones, which makes them faster on Internet Explorer, both IE6 and IE7. Since people’s experiences have varied depending on their hardware, software, and location, please let us know if these menus now work for you.

Private Message notifications: The “My Content” in your menu bar now turns orange when you have a private message waiting for you.

Blog formatting: Some blog pages didn’t format correctly, and these are now fixed.

Meanwhile, we are continuing to work on performance, including the issues that caused the outage Sunday night / Monday morning. This week we are also working on the top features that were lost in the move from VMTN Forums to VMware Communities, as well as some other usability improvements. I expect some good news on those two areas as well as performance over the course of the week.

I promise to keep you all informed more frequently of progress.

Why are we doing this upgrade anyway?

It's a good question, and a relevant one. The answer in short: The new features make it easier to share and find more information.

Here's how:

• Discussions: Discussions are still question-and-answer format, and a key source of technical and support information. If you've put a watch on a thread, you can now reply to the thread directly in the email generated by the watch -- you don't need to go back to the site to reply. And we will soon put into practice a flag that allows virtuoso-level community members and above flag content that requires a VMware response -- and we are training our product and development managers to look at those flagged posts first to ensure the critical questions requiring VMware company expertise get answered quickly.

• Documents: Documents are for sharing information or techniques that you have figured out, tested, and put into practice. For example, best practice explanations, sample code and scripts, process descriptions, or the spreadsheet format you use to track metrics. It's much easier to create them as documents rather than adding them as attachments to threads.

• Blogs: Every community member has a personal blog. Blogs are a great way to tell a story over time -- like an implementation diary describing a problem you encountered and the steps you took to overcome it. Let's say you need double computing capacity in six months on a fixed budget. Start by describing the goal you were given (or that you worked out for yourself), do another post a week later as you start to think out your plan, and so on. Another example is this blog, where the VMware Communities team is describing our plans and the issues we face as they unfold. We all want to read about issues our peers are facing, and a blog is a perfect way to describe complex problems and solutions as they unfold -- a blog is much more authentic than a summary written after the fact.

• Converting Threads to Documents: This solves the new visitor problem. A new visitor wants to get a sense of what is up with Workstation or VirtualCenter, and his only option was to read a lot of discussion threads. Now, the community can identify interesting threads, convert them to documents, and edit it down to the essential information of the post. For each community, we will create FAQ documents that are links to these converted threads, and serve as a great starting point for any community. New visitors can get the overview from each community's FAQ.

• Tagging: Tagging makes it easier to find information. Community members tag new blogs, documents, and discussions with keywords that lets the community define the categories where content is placed. And because you can add multiple tags, a discussion, document or blog post can appear in multiple categories, not just the traditional product categories of the old forums. The system recommends popular tags so it's easy to find existing relevant tags.

• Better Naming and URLs: Most everything in VMware Communities has easy-to-remember names and URLs. After http://communities.vmware.com, all communities start with "/community", threads start with "/thread", documents with "/doc", blogs with "/blog", people with "/people", and tags with "/tag". And all resources in the community are easy to link to via wiki markup syntax.

• RSS: Just about everything in VMware Communities is RSS-enabled, so you can subscribe to whole communities or various parts of them via RSS.

And last but not least: none of the above was possible with the old VMTN Forums. The new platform not only has many more features, but it is also more flexible and allows us to add new features and modify existing ones.

Back to the Short Answer

All of these features help make it easier for VMware Communities to grow in breadth and depth of information, and they make it easier to find more relevant information. Yes, it is still obvious that we need to continue ironing out usability issues so that community members can take advantage of the improvements. But as we do, and as the power of the new features becomes clear to more community members, the value of VMware Communities will grow.