Site issues/bugs

Media Cult · **Posted:** Sat Mar 22, 2008 9:55 am **Post subject:** Re: Site issues/bugs

Began thinking it might be gone forever. Good news!

Slayer · **Posted:** Sat Mar 22, 2008 3:35 pm **Post subject:** Re: Site issues/bugs

I had this database connection error before. It said something about maximum connections limit. It needs sorting with the provider.

spudthedestroyer · **Posted:** Sat Mar 22, 2008 3:46 pm **Post subject:** Re: Site issues/bugs

Slayer wrote:

I had this database connection error before. It said something about maximum connections limit. It needs sorting with the provider.

already reported, i saw it yesterday... i've queried about getting a different user and /or getting the connection limits increased

Slayer · **Posted:** Sat Mar 22, 2008 3:49 pm **Post subject:** Re: Site issues/bugs

Yay, now he/she/it only has to comply.

spudthedestroyer · **Posted:** Sat Mar 22, 2008 3:53 pm **Post subject:** Re: Site issues/bugs

Slayer wrote:

Yay, now he/she/it only has to comply.

Its a they, I may have to pay for more connections or another user, but obviously the sites need it. Currently I've got three seperate connections running on 1 user, I need to split these out ideally so the forums run on their own.

Slayer · **Posted:** Sat Mar 22, 2008 3:59 pm **Post subject:** Re: Site issues/bugs

OK, "he, she AND it" then

BadBugs · **Posted:** Mon Mar 24, 2008 1:08 am **Post subject:** Re: Site issues/bugs

Its beginning to feel like the wrong choice of host was made. The amount of downtime over this weekend alone is unbelievable.
This is actually more frustrating than the constant timeouts & lag we were having before as at least the site was accessible albeit sporadic.
Hope theres a simple fix to this Spud that doesnt invlove spending shitloads more money

spudthedestroyer · **Posted:** Mon Mar 24, 2008 1:16 am **Post subject:** Re: Site issues/bugs

I don't know about that, the amount of downtime on the new host has been significantly less than what we had on the old host in the space of three weeks. I can look at the stats to see there's been a heck of a lot more throughput.

There's been a complete blackout today, the entire ip range was unreachable which suggests hardware failure or a DDoS somewhere on the server cluster. That just means we were plum unlucky rather than anything overly avoidable, hardware failure is pretty much an annoyance where ever you are. Only thing you can do is have an infrastructure that's 100% redundancy (I work at a big company and they don't even have this :lol:

), or have a team that's there and has full access to swap out hardware at a minutes notice, both of which are incredibly expensive beyond what a site can offer.

Its speed of getting it back up, i'll find out the exact downtime and reason for; all i can say is on our old host it would still be down (there's a plethora of hardware failure mails i've got for our old host).

So anyway, I think I can say.

I'm annoyed that we've had downtime and will probably need to upgrade the hosting option; possibly even rent a virtual server which will cost eight times the amount hosting costs now.
The host is a hell of a lot more responsive than our last, both in terms of speed of site and in terms of response of service
They have a more responsive setup; it looks like dead-donkey was a heavy consumer of resources at a period earlier this week and because of it got locked down. I've added some mysql indexes, and will possibly disable or further restrict the frontpage search and come up with some caching to reduce that. I've been trying to get some stats out of the host so i can see if it wasa DDOS, a particular query, etc. but haven't got anything i can go off of so far.

AND, I haven't cancelled the old host and can migrate back... i just think it is very likely it would be far worse off than we are now.

^Rogue^ · **Posted:** Mon Mar 24, 2008 1:23 am **Post subject:** Re: Site issues/bugs

Good to have HHAH back.

spudthedestroyer · **Posted:** Mon Mar 24, 2008 1:36 am **Post subject:** Re: Site issues/bugs

@last post of mine, just wanted to add I'm not making excuses for them, but it looked like it was "bang pop" for a lot of their servers, whilst earlier on hhah consumed more resources that it had allocation for.

I'll look at VPS, but as mentioned 8x the cost.

BadBugs · **Posted:** Mon Mar 24, 2008 1:41 am **Post subject:** Re: Site issues/bugs

8x the cost? Holy Shit

What is different now between the old host & the new one?
Does this one charge more for the same deal & since the swap we are getting more hits?

spudthedestroyer · **Posted:** Mon Mar 24, 2008 1:47 am **Post subject:** Re: Site issues/bugs

Slightly less for shared actually, however its handled like a proper company. Because its resource usage, it would be a VPS that we'd need. That's more cpu and ram time.

+ I have cpanel, can create dbs, users, etc. have lots of config options, can control my own mail, etc.
+ Its a proper shared server, we have cpu allocation, its faster, its better hardware
- I do not have ssh access

The old hosts shared box was a bit of a shambles, so it was more for 'less'.

What i'm going to do is rewrite some of the frontpage code and remove things like stats gathering since now the host provides a better solution and maybe even cache the news at the top, but that would be a bit of programming work.

BadBugs · **Posted:** Mon Mar 24, 2008 1:56 am **Post subject:** Re: Site issues/bugs

I missed your edit on your previous post :lol:

I wish I understood this stuff, to me its all something I never learned due to the career choices I made, besides, when I was at school we worked on the really old commodore/ibm pcs with a green screen & green text (no colour) & the most modern comp in the school was a BBC Micro

I'm glad that you know what youre talking about & that you have ideas to make the sites load less on the server as I'd hate for you to have to go finding boatloads of extra cash when we already have a shortfall of donations.

Thanks for the explanations, even though I didnt understand all of it although I'd guess a lot of people will :mrgreen:

P.S Did we always have this many bots on the old forum?

spudthedestroyer · **Posted:** Mon Mar 24, 2008 2:01 am **Post subject:** Re: Site issues/bugs

There's options, top one is me rewriting some php to try and reduce server load

Quote:

P.S Did we always have this many bots on the old forum?

We did indeed

BadBugs · **Posted:** Mon Mar 24, 2008 2:06 am **Post subject:** Re: Site issues/bugs

I guess if that doesnt work & you end up having to go down the costly route, then you won't have a lot of choice but to blatantly ask for donations or go down the advertising route to help fund the site

spudthedestroyer · **Posted:** Wed Mar 26, 2008 8:33 pm **Post subject:** Re: Site issues/bugs

lol, i think i jynxed it by saying we had better uptime just... that little escapade just screwed that up.

Unfortunately we lost the box again just after the above discussion, and i was in the middle of ftping a file (that's why the forums has come up before the www

). That's very bad luck.

Quote:

Cluster available at nl-92.x.x.8 which serves as the PHP 5 cluster is currently down. This downtime is unexpected.

Cluster available at nl-92.x.x.8 which serves as the PHP 5 cluster is currently down. This downtime is unexpected.

Cause for the downtime is still unknown. Research of yesterday's access logs reveals server abuse by a few customers but this does not determine the complete unavailability of the cluster. Other possible assumption is hardware fault.

Please co-operate with us during this downtime. Your patience is appreciated.

We will update this news post as soon as we have any information that we can share with you!

Update: Mar 25, 2008 10:44 GMT
Server's SMPS power box was faulty. We have scheduled a replacement of this hardware tonight at 22:00 GMT. More updates will be available as soon as we have it.

Update: Mar 25, 2008 18:00 GMT
Due to heavy snowfall in Rotterdam technicain is not willing to drive till the data-center for fixing the aforementioned issue. It will be fixed by tomorrow. More updates will be available as soon as we have it.

Update: Mar 25, 2008 18:20 GMT
We are issuing refunds for those of you who feel that service has not been up to the mark. Anytime before 31st of March you are allowed to request a refund for the billing term March 1st to March 31st. More updates will be available as soon as we have it.

Final Update: Mar 26, 2008 15:30 GMT
All services restored.

That was very poor, not much could be done.

I have done a small update that i hope will reduce the load made by the frontpage. I may also choose to remove the 'site search' option for guests, and only offer frontpage / forum / scifi indvidually... you will have to be logged in to be able to search the entire site in one go.

BadBugs · **Posted:** Wed Mar 26, 2008 9:33 pm **Post subject:** Re: Site issues/bugs

spud wrote:

I may also choose to remove the 'site search' option for guests, and only offer frontpage / forum / scifi indvidually... you will have to be logged in to be able to search the entire site in one go.

Sounds like a good compromise

spudthedestroyer · **Posted:** Wed Mar 26, 2008 9:41 pm **Post subject:** Re: Site issues/bugs

its an annoyance but its a big sql statement.

spudthedestroyer · **Posted:** Wed Mar 26, 2008 9:44 pm **Post subject:** Re: Site issues/bugs

Hmm, I don't think this was a positive response to my complaints:

Quote:

Also, I do not overstate anything. As far as the uptime goes, its a bad month you can say. As far as technical support response goes, I can say that I will respond to all your tickets within 20 minutes during business hours.

How many times in a year does a hardware fail on a server? This is the first time on that machine for the past 1.5 years of service it has given us. And trust me, we are on contract with Dell's 24 hours hardware replace warranty but unfortunately it has occurred in the wrong time. First its Easter and then heavy snowfall. Per the information I have it should come up today.

Their uptime quotation is 5 days downtime a year, they've pretty much reached that in less than a month. All i can take is his word though, when we are up its clearly far faster than our previous host, so hopefully if this is true we won't be seeing this again... first hardware failure in 1.5 years.

Slayer · **Posted:** Wed Mar 26, 2008 11:00 pm **Post subject:** Re: Site issues/bugs

This was just a big stroke of bad luck. I think.

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