We're going to take down the journal websites for a few hours tonight starting at 7pm PST. Russ is going to upgrade to Topaz 0.9 (rc1) on the production servers while Josh replaces/rebuilds the dead drive on the Mulgara server.

Topaz 0.9 is primarily a performance release which will significantly enhance the speed of the journal websites. This release candidate was motivated by the performance problems uncovered with the CJ migration. There has been a re-architecture of the cache code and many OTM/Mulgara improvements by the Topaz developers. And they've upgraded many of the underlying applications. We've been performance testing this release candidate for the last two weeks and have seen significant improvements across the board from 0.8.

This release candidate isn't available to the public yet but will occur later this month after a bit more cleanup to the configuration files. The 0.9 release will also include the Ambra publishing application and two default "journals" - I'll have more information on Ambra closer to the release date.

Performance enhancements in Topaz 0.9

• Pre-ingest script (process_sip) for images transforms.
• Re-architected the cache code.
• Moved transactions to read-only queries where possible.
• Optimized slideshow retrieval/display.
• Optimized many actions (e.g. FetchArticleAction, GetAverageRatingsAction, etc.).
• Lots of Ambra code improvements.
• Upgraded to Dojo 1.1.
• Upgraded to Mulgara 1.2 (multi-core!).
• Upgraded to Lucene 2.3.
• Upgraded to ehCache 1.4.1.
• Many Ambra configuration changes for ease of installation.

Features fixed in RC 0.9

• Safara bugs fixed; ratings, drop-down menus.
• Ingest fixes; ingest doesn’t change .mov to .qt; ingest handles .swf files.
• Advanced search by past month & past three months working.
• Search results with correct journal context.
• XSL fixes.