Perth Mint online coin launch times

Discussion in 'General Precious Metals Discussion' started by goldpelican, Dec 20, 2011.

  1. bennybbc

    bennybbc Member Silver Stacker

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    I don't really care.
    A 1/20oz Colored Bullion Dragon, with a design tweak, to add to the other 5 million different dragons that are available. Whatever.....

    What would help the good people of Australia that like to support Australian products would be to sell some of the 1oz lunars to Australian dealers.
    APMEX have plenty of Dragons, slabbed 1st strike 20 or more? No problems. Box of 100? No problem, how many do you want? Aussie dealers that aren't price gougers get stuff all. Now we have to stay up till 3am to order a Snake? yeah great idea, that will fix everything!

    The Perth Mint is so pathetic. Most companies are proud of their home country, but not Govt owned companies in Australia. They are ashamed to be Australian and afraid of supporting Australian business. You wouldn't want to upset our price gouging friends at APMEX now would you.
    They want $180 for slabbed Dragon that the Perth Mint would have sold to them around the $30 mark. The same coins that Australians could have purchased off an Australian dealer for $40 - $50 if the Perth Mint wasn't so pathetic.

    Then the Aussies dealers stand up for the Perth Mint with the hope that they will get more snakes next year. Kind of like sucking up to the boss. They don't want to state the obvious on a public forum - that the PM has no backbone - out of fear of them not getting any limited mintage product in the future.

    Steve is 1 dealer around here that is not afraid to call a spade a spade and I respect him for that. Its a real shame that telling the truth and saying it how it is, is bad for business.
     
  2. silversardine

    silversardine Member

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    Don't think Platiplaty was talking about the Mint here, just general communications with Eastern states coworkers/workers/anyones.
     
  3. silversardine

    silversardine Member

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    In 12 years there will be another dragon release - people just getting ready now.
     
  4. Aust-Tech

    Aust-Tech New Member

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    Lets see, at 3am (Australian WST), it would be 9AM on the West Coast, US; 12PM on the East Coast, US; and 5PM in UK
    Sounds like the perfect opening time for US customers, definately not Australian customers.

    With regards to the PM website, people are denied service when new products are released or demand is high because there are too many hits at once to the same IP address (123.176.112.241) and the extra overloaded hits get dropped. This is the same as a DOS (Denial of Service) attack...lol...and companies wonder why their sites "crash". On the Perth Mint's side, the website appears quiet with not much activity. On the customers side, it will say in their browser "Connecting to ...<website>" but at times like 3AM, the lights in most companies aren't usually switched on to take immediate action.

    This problem has happened to most big sites, until they figure out that they need load balancing servers and CDN's (Content Delivery Network) to ease the bottlenecks in addition to a strong Tier 1 "backbone".

    Load balancing servers do what they say they will, balance the load (website hits) placed on the servers. A CDN will place 'copies' of the website on servers physically located around the world so that the content loads faster, and from an IT point of view for a company that last year (minor detail) pulled in $50 million in profit, doesn't appear amateur upon product release by time shifting the website from one time to another....last time i checked the internet runs 24/7/365...from an IT point of view, a website must do the same..

    Here's some Easter Eggbugs:

    Try going to the Perth mint website IP address direct at 123.176.112.241 (should goto the perth mint website)
    response:
    Web Server Name: WWW3
    You have arrived at the default page for the Server "WWW3". This Web Server is hosted on the Vivid Group Cluster provided by Accord.
    This page will display if there are no host headers configured in IIS on this Web Server for the domain you have just entered.

    Having a webserver with multiple websites (such as WWW2, WWW3, etc) without host headers additionally shows why it is difficult and takes longer for computers to find the Perth Mint website as computers use the IP address (above) to connect to a computer, not the FQDN (http://www.perthmint.com.au). So when people type in the FQDN, the (DNS) Domain Name System has to find the IP address from the 'phone book' of websites from a DNS server. When the phone book finds the website, it then directs the computer to the IP address. A bit of a run around...Normally, it should be faster to go straight to 123.176.112.241 than http://www.perthmint.com.au

    Nowadays with cloud computing, where a website can run on many millions of computers at once if required, a site can easily handle the load...although as GP stated approving changes to problems, once identified, can be like the 10,000m hurdles in the olympics for some companies.

    on the far side, anyone seen this old perth mint 'Client Preview' site...lol
    http://clientpreview.vividcluster.crox.net.au/perthmint/

    and this chinese site by Perth Mint named 'WWW2' at http://perthmint.cn/ ... wonder what they will do with that domain name since it's been active since 2008 and nothing has appeared there for 3yrs...hmm
     
  5. goldpelican

    goldpelican Administrator Staff Member

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    Not necessarily - you're assuming that particular domain is the only website hosted on that server. Virtual hosts and whatnot.

    Same thing happens for Silver Stackers on 223.130.24.130 ;)

    The web server isn't necessarily the bottleneck - all you need is some CRM, ERP, Treasury or accounting integration, and there's a world of hurt involved in capacity planning. Throwing more web resources at a middleware problem doesn't solve anything. Growth hurts everywhere :)
     
  6. Aust-Tech

    Aust-Tech New Member

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    No, I don't assume...I already knew that there were five (aussiegoldnuggets.com, goldcorp.com.au, perthmint.com.au, www.perthmint.com.au and perthmint.cn) domain websites being hosted (WWW2, WWW3, etc) on the same server, and that's why I also mentioned host headers and why they help...they don't help if there is only one website on the one server..

    With SS, there are other hosts pointing to the same IP. With the Perthmint, the sites above are websites hosted on the same IP, not pointing to, an enormous resource difference.

    If one does not control or throttle end users, the server may run out of resources. Customer website hits can eat up all a companies bandwidth. A webserver/Admin must keep an eye on connections and limit connections per second. This is serving 101.

    The website itself is not necessarily the bottleneck, but the usage of it at certain times is..

    This document from Microsoft says it all..
    The Art and Science of Web Server Tuning

    Performance Tuning as an Art
    There are as many ways to tune a Web server's performance as there are Web sites on the Internet. Depending upon the choices a company has made about its presence on the Web, a person may be responsible for tuning the Web servers to best serve static Web pages or dynamically compiled application pages. Each type of site demands different hardware, application, and Windows and IIS performance tuning options. Another consideration is the amount of traffic that the company may realistically expect their Web site to handle, particularly during peak load periods. Load will affect Web server performance, and varying business choices, such as the breadth of your company's advertising campaign, can determine the number of user requests your Web sites will be required to handle. You should have a good idea of what those loads will be and simulate them on your servers before you put them on line. These are a few of the reasons why there is no silver bullet recommendation on how to tune your Web server.
    Performance tuning a Web server should be viewed as an art as much as a science: trial and error can be an important technique in determining what settings and hardware work best for your Web site's requirements. While it's crucial that you understand the technical settings discussed in this document, it is equally important that you understand the profile of your applications or Web sites and how they behave under different conditions. Like a painter who sketches in charcoal to develop a sense of how he wants to create a painting, you need to have a plan for evaluating your Web server performance. The first step is to set up a controlled environment in which to test your Web site, conduct performance analysis of predicted loads, and then measure performance in that environment before you expose your Web server to the Internet. Since the performance of the server can vary greatly with the amount of browser traffic hitting your site during different periods, be sure to monitor your test site under a number of different loads to capture a true picture of activity on the server. During this period, you can develop backup plans to help prevent your site from going down due to any problems during or after deployment.
    To improve server performance, examine every part of the system for potential bottlenecks. Bottlenecks can be caused by inadequate or improperly configured hardware or by software settings in either IIS or Windows. A good monitoring plan checks performance in all areas.
    Once you know how your server is performing, you can begin to make changes aimed at improving performance. Changes should be made one at a time, with a tested rollback plan, or it becomes difficult to assess the impact of individual changes.
    After each change is made, continue to monitor to see if the change has had the desired effect. If unwanted side effects are observed, the rollback procedure can be performed, returning the server to its previous state. Because changes to one resource can cause bottlenecks to appear in other areas, it is important to check on the performance of all resources after you make a change. Once you have assessed the impact of a change, you can determine whether further changes are necessary.

    Why Tune Your Web Servers?
    There are a number of good business reasons for you to tune your Web servers. First, the improved performance that tuning provides will create a better user experience with less waiting while the server responds to requests. Tuning will help avoid usage bottlenecks, and can help extend the time between hardware upgrades or the purchase of new servers for your Web farm. This allows you to budget for when you really need to purchase new components such as RAM, processors, disks, and network cards.
    Along with these business reasons, there are a number of technical reasons to tune your Web server's performance. Tuning allows you to best take advantage of the hardware that you do have and to determine what upgrades you need to make now or in the future. By tuning your Web server you can maximize throughput and minimize response times of your Web applications, and determine which of these applications are handling peak loads as required.

    :)
     
  7. goldpelican

    goldpelican Administrator Staff Member

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    I did this sort of stuff for a living up until very recently, but more proprietary CMS and middleware related - I'm a reformed solutions architect.
     
  8. Aust-Tech

    Aust-Tech New Member

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    nice...I'm a Microsoft Partner, have MSCE (Microsoft Certififed Systems Engineer) and MCT (Microsoft Certified Trainer) certifications, among others, but grew up around DEC terminals, punch card machines and the Rex Vowels X-Ray laboratory that my mum was the Scientist in charge of at UNSW as a kid 30 something years ago....We even setup Australia's first computer communication between two (which grew to 19) deaf children in 1989 at the annual camp run in honour of my mum now called the Veronica James Camp for the Hearing Impaired ...Same technology as MSN messenger, but in 89' it was something..it was even on ch10 news!

    All the same, as long as the Perth Mint get their frontend/backend in order, I'll be happy....
     
  9. bennybbc

    bennybbc Member Silver Stacker

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  10. bennybbc

    bennybbc Member Silver Stacker

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    Seems to be working now, hmm strange probably user error. More importantly is that a 10kg tiger you have for sale?
     

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