Saturday Night Site Problems

As people have noticed, our add-books functionality died on Saturday evening, together with lesser systems that "reach out" and get data from elsewhere. We didn't have good instrumentation on the system that went down, so we didn't notice it until I noticed it in passing. FWIW, this is terrible. LibraryThing needs better alerts. We are working on it.

Ganawa was able to get Amazon connectivity working again, but Overcat has deeper problems that won't be fixed until morning.

Sorry for any inconvenience this causes. Thank you for your patience.

>1 timspalding:

Thank you for explaining. I (and, I expect, many others) really do appreciate knowing.

There has been a regularly occurring issue with adding books going on for at least a feed months now. Overcat and multiple library sources (don’t know about Amazon as I don’t use them as a source).
I was able to add books both last weekend and during this past week, despite there being issues.

Speaking of issues during weekends, the wiki has collapsed during the weekends on a regular basis for several months now. It’s been creating havoc in the TIOLI challenges.

>3 PawsforThought: Ah, is this why Libris no longer works? I emailed them to ask whether there have been any changes on their side and got a reply that said, no, not as far as they are aware.

>4 anglemark: I’m assuming it is. I’ve been able to add from there but then the next time it doesn’t work, etc.

>5 PawsforThought: Overcat is responding normally again as of about an hour ago.

Is this also causing the problems with images or is that a separate issue? Last night I got a cloudflare error when I tried recalculating work covers, then I started getting cloudflare errors when I went to any author page that had an author picture. Today I can go to author pages fine but some cover images are not loading.

>7 norabelle414: Cover images have been an ongoing issue since the new work page was launched.

>8 PawsforThought: I have not had any significant issues in months, until last night

>9 norabelle414: Really? I have issues almost every time I go in to edit something. It’s been fine for most of the past week, but now it’s a pain again.

It looks like add books is working fully now—except for sources which, for other reasons, are not working, as often happens. Images (covers and otherwise) are struggling, however.

Do you mean Friday night, April 11?

>11 timspalding: Adding books is broken again, except for Amazon. All my searches at libraries and Overcat are failing again, though the Amazon locales I tried all seem to work.

adding books from amazon.de and amazon.com is broken again

Sorry for the trouble! We had unfortunate server issues over the weekend which affected a number of features on LibraryThing. @Ganawa is working on restoring everything, now; things should be coming back up to their full operation soon. We'll post updates here. Thanks for your patience.

>15 kristilabrie: Are these server issues the reasons some threads are being created multiple times? I saw at least three instances of duplicated threads.
(Friday at 705 pm, Yesterday at 331 pm and another today at 904 am.)

EDIT: spelling

>16 gilroy: I'm assuming so, yes. (I saw the first two you mentioned, not this morning's, but the timeline lines up.)

>17 kristilabrie: The third one was over in this group:
https://www.librarything.com/ngroups/2806/Accessibility-on-LibraryThing

Adding books is still working intermittently. I keep getting the error message: Amazon server connect failed. If I try repeatedly, it eventually works, but something is not working as intended.

Update: we're having issues with one of our servers and this has caused Overcat's Overcat-type searches to not work again as of a couple of hours ago.

We're working on mitigating this and hope to have it back up in the next few hours.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

(Note: I'll update https://www.librarything.com/topic/370084 when we have something, but we should update here as well.)

>20 ccatalfo:

To add to CC: We currently have a problem server, going up and down at bad times. Last week Abby went into the server farm and replaced the CPU, hoping that would fix it. It didn't, and indeed it seems to be doing worse now. Unfortunately, we are pretty near capacity, so losing a server takes a toll. We are working to fix it, but are also pricing and ordering two new servers so we aren't in this situation in the future.

Update: Overcat's Overcat data source is back up. We're also working on a replacement service for that, just tweaking performance now. Once that's good, we'll switch to it from our old one and we should be more impervious to server issues.

Thank you all from the bottom of my heart for your efforts on these issues. I imagine you must be working your butts off.
Just informational, not complaining, but to let you know for your troubleshooting, I'm still having to load searches of Your Library twice on pretty much every search I do (Running windows 10 in on dell laptop, chrome browser). Trying hard to not beat my head on the wall. I should pad part of my desk for the purpose, I think, the way things are going with the V.A. (unrelated but exacerbating aggravation).
We appreciate you.

I was trying to post a picture of the Bibliocat here but apparently we can't do pictures here. Thought you might be able to use some cat therapy. He's excellent for that. Oh well. Moonshadow also wishes you well.

>25 BookHavenAZ: You can post pictures :) You just need to upload them somewhere first. If you do not have another place, LT has a junk drawer: https://www.librarything.com/gallery/member/MEMBERNAME/junkdrawer

Then click on the image to grab its address and post it here with the usual html notation for pictures.

>25 BookHavenAZ: Yes, we can do pictures here.

Thanks to all the LT staff for not just keeping stuff working but for also keeping us informed about it.

At present add books is working—Amazon, Overcat and libraries. (Failures are always possible, and some libraries will go down for reasons unrelated to us, but the system itself is not failing.)

That's where we are, but underneath we are struggling a bit. We are in the process of ordering two new servers to deal with them.

I had a manual-add go bad last night (I was able to delete and re-add), I assume that's related to server strain the same as the ongoing duplicate topics?

Still getting no search results when searching LIBRIS and having difficulty finding things through Overcat. When I do get results in Overcat I see things from LIBRIS so there must be something wrong with the LIBRIS connection to LT (their website works perfectly fine, if that matters).

Aaaand now I’m getting failed searches on Overcat again.

>26 AnnieMod: I thought I'd done it in the past but I've apparently forgotten how. Obviously it's been awhile, LOL.

Failed searches as of this morning.

testing add picture
https://pics.cdn.librarything.com//picsizes/16/46/16467963-r-h1200-w1200-pv25_63...
but I fail. Oh well

>35 BookHavenAZ: You are nearly there. Add the appropriate HTML around the URL.

{IMG SRC="http://host.com/picture.jpg"} change {} to angle brackets.

More instructions here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/328936#7451226

>31 PawsforThought: As i wrote earlier, I contacted them and they have changed nothing on their side recently.

>31 PawsforThought: Do you have an example of a failed search on Libris? (I just added: Thinking, fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman by using Libris as source, so something works)

>38 bnielsen: I was adding works by Euripides and it worked approximately 1/4 of the time. I kept going and clicking search over and over. I did get them all eventually but it took a lot longer than it normally would have. And this was three days ago and I haven’t added anything since.

>39 PawsforThought: Thanks. I might try to use a z39.50 client to see if a direct connect to Libris is flaky, so it is nice to have an example.

National Library of Australia reported failing on children's book searches yesterday, I'm taking a closer look: https://www.librarything.com/topic/370283

ETA: our connection failed for some reason, so I'm reaching out to them.

>41 kristilabrie: They are now FOLIO and not Voyager. If I'm right, there will be new connection details.

>42 lesmel: Looks like they no longer provide open access, alas. :(

>22 timspalding: These new servers are coming soon, right? We seem to continue to struggle with add books searches going up and down, threads duplicating, and collections misbehaving... Which all seem linked to the misbehaving server.

>44 gilroy: We are expediting in every way we can. Obviously these aren't servers you can go to BestBuy and take home. So it does take some time to order them, ship them, and then install them. But we're hoping we are talking days, not weeks. This is an all-consuming thing with us right now. fingers crossed.

Still cant add books from amazon germany. i am getting a connection failed error.

Update.
Tried amazon.com, overcat aswell. always the same connection failure

Seariching for the ISBN: 9783734113369

It's working for me. And I see additions all day. Try yourself again?

I was having trouble this afternoon, but it worked later.

Update: we have ordered new servers and will be installed within the next few weeks. Obviously a lot to juggle.

Any update on the new server(s)? I've been trying to hold back on cataloguing acquisitions until there was more server power available. If it's going to be a few more days I can wait, just wondering since I haven't seen any staff mention it recently.

>51 GraceCollection:

We aren't having any problems as of now—or for a bit.

The new servers are here and gradually being brought into systems.

>52 timspalding: I think some indexing is slower than usual.

https://www.librarything.com/topic/96191#n8866821

I'm also seeing this. (Searching for Brendborg in my catalog should find the two latest additions.)

>52 timspalding: But cover images are still being slow to load or not loading at all.

>54 NinieB: All covers? I only see that with covers I have just uploaded, all other covers load fast.

>55 anglemark: Not all covers, some existing covers.

>52 timspalding: I'll give it a try, but I've been seeing a lot of talk about search failures with 'add books' and problems with covers in Bug Collectors; that's why I thought the new servers weren't up yet.

Covers are slow for me too. I was looking through some Thomas Mann titles last night (mid afternoon US east coast time) and more than half either didn’t load at all (just kept spinning) or took ages to finally appear.

I'm still seeing some duplicate posts around Talk, as well.