VMware Communities Blog

November 21 Update

Badsah — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 02:49:00 GMT

Last update before we Americans go stuff ourselves over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend: performance and stability appear to be fine for the fifth straight day. Given this, and a combination of VMware's scheduled maintenance windows plus holiday vacation schedules for critical team members, we have decided to postpone the deployment of a second node to our cluster until first week of December.

Thank you, and will be back online on Monday, November 26!

Badsah Mukherji, Sr. Community Manager, VMware

November 20 Update: Note U.S. Holiday, Nov. 22-23 (Thanksgiving)

Badsah — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 23:31:00 GMT

NOTICE: Due to the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, the VMware's U.S. offices will be closed Thursday and Friday, November 22 and 23, 2007.

Well, we are cautiously optimistic that we've reached a period of stability on the site. We have enjoyed four plus days of continuous uptime, and the performance has been consistently reasonable. We are still targeting end of next week (last week of November) for adding the second server to the cluster, to enhance the performance.

If you still encounter sporadic error messages, reload/refresh the page and you will usually see the error disappear. If the problem persists, please bring it to our attention. Details such as timing, page information, and specifics of what you were doing at the time are helpful, as always.

Thank you.

Badsah Mukherji, Sr. Community Manager, VMware

October 30 Update

RDellimmagine — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 04:44:00 GMT

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.

Feature Fix Released

RDellimmagine — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 23:49:00 GMT

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.

Features in the pipeline

JohnTroyer — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 01:55:00 GMT

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.)

Monitoring and IE Performance

RDellimmagine — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 06:43:00 GMT

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.

One step at a time -- site update

JohnTroyer — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 00:47:00 GMT

You may notice some small changes in the Communities today.

Discussion tabs are now selected by default. From there, you can more easily see unread posts (bold) and link directly to the last reply (last column)
Status icons are back in threads

We are targeting another update by early next week.

We continue to experience slow performance at certain times. We're working closely with Jive to identify the root cause and resolve these issues. We have monitoring in place that will automatically restart the application when it becomes unresponsive. IE performance, both with IE6 and IE7, remains problematic. Along with overall slow behavior, the editor seems to load with difficulty. Once it loads, try clicking on the Plain Text tab and then clicking on 'Always use this editor'. The Plain Text editor may load more reliably.

Today's update. During the launch, we patched the application several times. We needed ensure our source control system was in sync with these changes and to do regression testing so that future updates would not break anything. This why you haven't seen a lot of changes this week. Today we switched to this new version of the code -- and we also slipped in those two features.

UI update. While we were waiting, we've already queued up a number of fixes, including faster CSS-based menus to replace the slow Javascript menus and many other UI changes. One of the major goals is to make IE more usable with this update. We'll be testing that build Friday but may wait until after the weekend to release.

Feature update. We also have developers working on the most important missing features from this list: VMware Communities Known Issues. We'll have a better estimate tomorrow, but I am hoping the first batch them will also appear next week.

Ongoing work. We expect to continue the bug fixes and improvements for several more weeks. After that we hope changes will happen less frequently, and we can start to experiment and learn what we can do with our new collaboration tools. See What's It All About? for more information on why we upgraded the Communities.

Performance Tuning & Usability

RDellimmagine — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 06:34:00 GMT

Performance: We implemented performance fixes today, which have decreased load times of pages and removed the intermittent delays many users were experiencing.

Configuration changes on the proxy
Increased cache size on the application server
Removal of Javascript from the homepage dropdowns and the right column

We are working to further reduce the amount of Javascript in the next few days, especially on the homepage. And we are continuing to monitor performance and work with Jive Software to resolve issues.

We are now turning our focus to the many usability fixes and improvements you all have been reporting.

Lost in Transition: To start off, we are working on the following Forums features missing in Clearspace:

Threaded view
See all posts from user -- now you can only see the new threads started by a user, not all posts and replies
View communities with unread threads at a glance, so users can scan the list of communities and see which ones have new posts since they last visited
Visible indicator of watches/favorites so users can track threads they were researching or working on answering.
Set # of posts per page as a per-user configurable preference
Search returns per-Message results, i.e. if a search term shows up in several messages of a thread, it should return one result instead of one result per message
Turn off the editor and use a plain text editor
User filter in search, i.e. ability to search by user
Code markup missing, e.g. for [code], pre , and [url]{noformat}
Search in this community (currently only search in all communities)
Advanced search so users don't have to do a blank search to get to the advanced search functionality
No PM notification if private email

These are roughly in priority order, although we may increase the priority of the editor fix, since that prevents some users from posting. We will update here and in the Missing Features thread.

Other Usability Fixes: We are also looking at other usability fixes, and will have a fully-prioritized list tomorrow. Among others, we are looking at the following:

Making Discussions the default tab (not All Content), which will make read tracking of threads more visible
Fixing OR search
Turn off default email notification

Low-Hanging Fruit: While we investigated the more important issues, we slipped in some easy fixes:

Fixing of Reply button so it doesn't fall off the page -- we enclosed those pages in a <table>
We will add tables to a few other pages with similar problems
Put "Up to Discussions" link at the bottom of threads as well -- they were only at the top
Put points in Top Members boxes
Ensure all listings have Previous and Next buttons -- listings on All Contents tab did not

I know many of you continue to be frustrated, but I ask you to bear with us while we fix these issues. With a little patience, I still firmly believe the benefits of the new features will become more and more apparent. One is already apparent to us behind the scenes -- this platform is much easier to customize and bug-fix than Forums. We are working to push out fixes as fast as we can.

Performance Update

JohnTroyer — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 05:40:00 GMT

The site is fast enough to use, but we continue to experience periodic issues.

We will be rebooting at the top of every hour. Please don't submit posts around this time.

Thank you for your extreme patience as we return the site to a useful state.

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