On January 1st and January 2nd, a full import of all of 8chan's active content was migrated to Infinity Next, which exists at https://beta.8ch.net and is the last planned import of data from 8ch. No further content will be perserved. It included all boards and users that existed on December 22nd, and all posts made between January 1st and 2nd.
It is suggested that small boards, particularly those suffering the most from frozen indexes and white pages, migrate as soon as possible. As in, right now. Your board should be there. If you want to switch, make a sticky and link your users to your board on the new site. Because of how files were migrated, the sooner your board switches, the better it will be. Attachments lost on 8ch.net are also lost on the beta because they are linked, so the longer your board stays active on 8ch.net, the less migrated content will exist on the new site when the switch is forced for all boards.
The last thing we must do is to repurpose 8chan's servers for Next. The new site is running on far fewer resources than the main site. To migrate those involves shutting down live site resources so that they may use the new software. It cannot be one or the other. Larger boards, like /v/ and /pol/, will be the last ones permanently forced over, and by that point the main 8ch.net domain will point to what exists on beta.8ch.net. I'd like to thank /v/ specifically for their patience, feedback, and energy.
2015 was hard on 8chan. We are succumbing to a slow death of atrophy from our incurable software issues. With Next, at the very least, you can make posts, share media, and stay anonymous. Not a tall order, but it has somehow been lost with current Infinity. Beneath these things, all else is secondary. Next is not perfect and will continue to be worked on weeks and months after the switch, but as long as you can fucking post, 8chan will find a way to grow and be great, as it is our nature to be great.
I love you guys, Josh
@8ntech (Latest updates)
Addendum 1 [ Jan 4 23:48 Manila ]
We may be redirecting smaller boards instead of encouraging people to simply point users in one direction. I didn't expect to have copypaste actively working on this so soon. Since he is on board and helping me do stress tests and redirects, it should accelerate the migration.
The goal is to leverage enough off of the current site that we can safely begin shutting servers down for the switch.
Addendum 2 [ Jan 5 01:37 Manila ]
We've switched from Memcached to Redis with relative ease, however, attempting to push all smaller boards over crashed Redis. We had the same problem with Memcached. Our cache layer continues to be the biggest point of failure on the site and I'm diagnosing why that is now.
Next heavily utilizes memory-level caching to avoid having to talk to the database every time you load the page, and to avoid having to rely on slow Disk I/O for caching. Redis and Memcached have different approaches to the same job: storing tiny bits of data in a list.
My theory is that when we pull the switch and slam Next with a thousand connections, the first time every page loads is incredibly slow and the database attempts to store too much information at once. The combination of too many connections, too much data, and too few resources causes it to crash in these extreme load instances.
Tomorrow we will do more stress testing, but instead of doing all small boards, we will do small boards in alphanumeric ranges. Boards starting with any number, then 0-9 and a-d, then 0-n, etc, until we are at 0-z.
If, for whatever reason, we cannot stabilize Next with our current approach, I will begin looking into document caching.
Addendum 3 [ Jan 6 06:41 Manila ]
I've spent my time the last few days working from the moment I wake up to when I sleep tinkering with the environment and optimizing code. I believe, finally, I've found the root cause of Redis's instability and have allocated a reasonable amount of resources to each part of the system.
Since we will be following this server as a blueprint, subsequent setups should be much quicker.