What happened to the forum?

[thomas]

First of all, my apologies for the recent downtime. According to Murphy's law such things only happen on days when the admin is not around.

The reason for the recent DB errors is simple: we receive too many hits, the server cannot cope with the number of visitors and their requests to our databases. Good for the ego, bad for our visitors. It seems that we will soon have to migrate to a virtual private or a dedicated server. Any sponsors out there?

;)

[Twisted]

Maybe we should start banning people. Just randomly. That'll save some bandwith. :D

Or divide our users into different groups, who can only access the forum on pre-specified times. :)

[thomas]

Lol, I'll consider your suggestions! :)

Perhaps I will have to discontinue the banner exchange, we'll see. I thought I still had a few months until breakdown.

[Iron Chef]

Just out of curiousity, how long was the actual downtime--anybody know offhand (24+ hours)? At any rate, things seem back to normal for the time being. I assume such episodes don't occur very often, so it's really only a minor inconvenience for forum members considering the directory was still working at the time unless i'm mistaken.

[thomas]

According to the 250 mails notifying me about the DB mishap the forum must have been down for about 12+ hours. I also received a dozen mails from desperate visitors, lol. At any rate, let's cross our fingers and hope it won't reoccur.

;)

[Twisted]

<Twin Peaks quote>

It is happening again...

</Twin Peaks quote>

[Twisted]

It's not due to some DOS-attack from that ***** we banned last week is it?

[thomas]

It's a technical issue that's most likely related to the latest version of MySQL or Cpanel (the account control system). There's a long discussion about the prob at the vBulletin forum, obviously we are not the only forum to be affected

=> http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=69171

[Twisted]

Good thing about these crashes is that we can now tell what time Thomas wakes up every day. :D

[thomas]

Lol, what a life! Hm, I think as long as these DB issues prevail, I better adapt my biorhythm to my server's time (US Mountain Time).

;)

[Twisted]

This actually has quite an impact on the visits to my own website as well. A lot of my visitors originate from this forum.

[thomas]

There's really nothing my hosting company or I can do about it at the moment, as it is related to server software. I was told that they are working hard to solve the problem. I keep my fingers crossed.

[thomas]

Again, two hours of downtime this morning, I apologize for the inconvenience. I think that this time Googlebot was the culprit, exceeding the number of max connections to the database by deepcrawling the forum. Our server-related problems seem to be more or less solved, thus whenever database corruption occurs it will be related to the number of visitors during peak hours.

[Marc]

Isn't there a way to prevent searchbots from wasting forum's bandwith? I know this will result in less visits since google's cache image of this site won't be updated , but now that we are at the edge maybe it could be a temporary solution.

[thomas]

Hi Marc, you are right, it is possible to block any searchbot from accessing the forum, but that would also affect our SERP ranking. Actually, there haven't been any DB errors for quite a while, so I'm inclined to wait for Google's next deepcrawl and see what happens.

:)

[lineartube]

load balacing, anyone? :)

[thomas]

Lol, if someone sponsored one or two dedicated servers, sure... ;)