“My Dance Lists”

I spent some time drawing up a programme for the upcoming end-of-April Rhein-Main-Mini-Social and assigned it to the FSCDC teachers' group so Marie could have a look at it before I posted it to the public. But the list didn't show up on her “My Dance Lists” page. What was going on?

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New Feature Roundup

This week saw the addition of various small new features to the dance database. Here's a quick roundup.

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Short Links and “The Reel”

While we're talking about minor features of the Strathspey SCD Database, here's another topic we haven'T really covered a lot so far. This is the “short links” service and, in particular, its relationship to The Reel, the newsletter put out by the RSCDS London Branch.

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Sorting Dance Lists

Sometimes there are clearly-useful features in the database that just seem to be overlooked. But it's fun to add them in when it turns out people have a need for them, just to help these people out.

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Database News

I finally managed to whip one of my long-standing Strathspey SCD Database enhancements into shape to a point where I feel reasonably confident about releasing it into the wild. So … drum roll … please welcome the Graphical Dance List Editor!

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MiniCrib News

As of 31 December, the popular MiniCrib library of SCD cribs is now published in .DOCX (rather than .DOC) format. Way to go! We took the opportunity to improve the way MiniCrib is imported to the Strathspey SCD database.

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Strathspey server outage, part 2

Just very briefly – it seems that I managed to fix the Strathspey server memory issue by merely changing the configuration of the application server (Gunicorn) such that a Django worker process is preemptively shut down and replaced with a fresh new one after it has served 250 requests (or so – Gunicorn adds random “jitter” so that not all worker processes are cycled at the same time). The number of requests used to be unlimited, such that the worker processes would grow over time until they consumed most of the memory in the machine.

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Strathspey server outage

The year is getting off to a great start already since early today the main server process on the Strathspey server crashed (i.e., was killed for lack of available memory) and I didn't notice until just now. This is especially aggravating because during the last few days I spent quite some time installing and configuring infrastructure to ensure that I do find out about that sort of thing as quickly as possible. Bother.

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