Re: Connectivity issues last Tuesday

On 10/17/20 2:02 PM, Heather Vescent wrote:
> Is there any way to estimate the number and frequency of this kind of
> fatal issue? 

Unfortunately, it's impossible to predict these sorts of issues... you
(we) are beholden to whatever infrastructure we choose to use. We are
beholden to the browser vendor, data center, and upstream network
provider we choose to use from home. If any of those infrastructure
providers decide to change the infrastructure in a breaking way, we
won't ever get a heads up on it. It'll just happen, like it did during
the call this week.

> It's clear we won't have a stable version of Jitsi since
> its functionality is interdependent with other systems not under their
> control. 

Just highlighting that Jitsi was stable... it was Google Chrome that
caused the instability. That's probably neither here nor there for folks
that just want to join a call and talk, I totally get that, but we
shouldn't lose sight of this fact:

The Jitsi server was just fine, the dial in bridges continued to work,
anyone that wasn't using Chrome 86 had full functionality.

If those that had connectivity issues just dialed in, the meeting could
have continued w/o moving to Zoom. This is, of course, easy to say in
hindsight... at the time, we didn't know what was going on. This
particular issue caught a non-trivial number of Jitsi admins off guard;
it wasn't just us.

> Is there a way for us to manage/reduce this situation in the future?

This particular one, no -- it's one of those unpredictable software
ecosystem things.

The community wanted video conferencing, high definition audio, and
backwards compatibility with everything we had before -- the complexity
of that system is orders of magnitude greater than a simple phone dial
in system with an IRC bridge. That means there is far more stuff that
can go wrong. It took months to get the old conference system
stabilized... we're barely one month into production on the new system.

We're just going to have to learn and adjust as we go. Every new
software system takes some time to break in, as frustrating as that may be.

From now on, if people are stating that they can't hear/talk (and others
can), we will want to ask them to switch browsers or just use the dial
in number (and can expand local numbers if folks as for local dial in
options).

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny - https://www.linkedin.com/in/manusporny/
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Veres One Decentralized Identifier Blockchain Launches
https://tinyurl.com/veres-one-launches

Received on Saturday, 17 October 2020 20:17:43 UTC