Forum Screwing Up?

What's going on with the forum? It seems like it's screwing up. It dosen't show up that there are posts when there are... is it just me? Go to the PHP fourm and look. Almost all of the new ones say 0 for replies when there really are.

*shrugs*
That's devshed for ya'll

no way... i was just wondering WTF is wrong w/ the Html/css/js forum, then i hit the lounge & see this... yeah, something is up w/ vbulletin on devshed here... plus, got a mysql error when posting a reply to a topic. time to upgrade something

no way... i was just wondering WTF is wrong w/ the Html/css/js forum, then i hit the lounge & see this... yeah, something is up w/ vbulletin on devshed here... plus, got a mysql error when posting a reply to a topic. time to upgrade something



yikes! - just got a mysql error posting this msg!

I just hate this threads with 'zero' replies Can you spell t-r-a-n-s-a-c-t-i-o-n-s...

well it looks like its really munted to me!

deadshed is right now.... Great one guys!

Its really good that they use something like mod_rewrite to bring extra traffic into the forums but dont consider the server load associated with it. And then just royally screw up left, right and centre "fixing" it.

Sorry if this has upset someone but that is the way things look from my point of view.

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.