Deadshed revival

Ooooh nice to see Dead Shed working again !

christo

I think its almost starting to be more down than up

Uh oh... And now it´s more buggy than ever before.
In a post i read "Posts: 0" in the user´s description. Some of my old posts are in wrong order now (reply before question). The last post does not show up in the overview anymore. Every second post i get a "there is a problem with the database" error...

[update]Even though it says there is a problem with the database, my post still made it here [/update]

Hey guys, what the hell are you doing???

good point... I just can't believe it was down for so long. You'd think they could just thrown in a replacement server, recover $latest_backup, (if necessary), or swap the drives, re-IP the box (if drives not swapped), and hit the 'on' button.

ZZZZZzzzzzz

christo

(who just rebuilt the kernel on his big-box for SCSI emulation - yay \o/)

This is even wierder. I see even more what you mean there Manuel.. whenever I post, I get a message saying that there 'seems to be a slight problem with the database server', but the post still goes it - Groovey!!!


christo

The following is an edited version of an e-mail we sent to one concerned forum member that sent us an e-mail about the forum troubles:

We had most of the problems solved last week. Most of them were due to
mysql taking up too much resources (memory, etc.) to keep up with our
growth. The FreeBSD / mysql threading system doesn't scale well, and we were
running out of memory.

So, we moved the MySQL server to a Linux box, and that solved all kinds of
problems - until what seemed to be hardware problems started popping up.
Unexplained reboots, lockups, kernel panics, etc. So we added another GB
of RAM to the original FreeBSD box, moved the DB back, and we're trying to
optimize the best we can. Forums searches appear to be out of the question
for now because of the size of the forums. (We are looking into ways of
fixing that - it looks doable.)

Today we're recompiling the FreeBSD kernel to allow for larger
applications. MySQL was hitting the kernel limit and choking this weekend.
Unfortunately, We'm not in a position where We can recompile the kernel and
reboot that box until tomorrow. We really don't know if/when the threading
will be an issue any more. More new hardware (linux) will be the answer if
that's the case.

We also ran a repair on the forums db's last night (as we found some tables
were corrupted) and that seemed to help immensely.

We are getting over 100k page impressions a day now (even with our
downtime), up from 40-50k/day back in January. The growth, as well as the
hardware problems have gotten ahead of us. We think we're getting closer to
a solution, but We really can't say for sure. Believe me, it's not
intentional. It's like being slash-dotted every day around here lately,
everything that can go wrong is going wrong.

We appreciate your patience, and again, sorry we don't follow up with you, our members,
more. We wish we had more time to dedicate to fixing this. We're pulling in a
FreeBSD expert (actually one of the owners of the company who tends to be very hands off) to help this week.

Glad you got the forums back online 100k impressions a day? impressive...

Ya - that is quite impressive. You can get some pretty good advertising dollars for that many impressions....

i did guess so...

Seems like quantity supersedes quality and you still can make money of it... Bad times are coming, i´m telling you...



PS: Hey, Pinky, i got an idea...

Oh yeah, we're just rolling in it.

No, the days of making a fortune off a dot-com are gone, we're just trying to stay afloat. Honestly, if we hadn't sold off 32bit.com last year, we probably wouldn't be here right now.

I think we made some good progress today. We have mysql tamed with some changes to my.cnf, we've re-indexed the search tables, and that's helped. We're also making some kernel changes so it won't choke if/when mysql gets out of control again. I don't think it will.

Please let us know if/when you see any problems. So far things are performing better than they have in weeks (months?).

Thanks,

Randy

It's nice to see the place back online again, and let's hope it stays that way for a while...
Quite a few people visited the forums even though things didn't work as they should, that's got to mean something, right?

//NoXcuz

cool! devshed's working again.