We're being assisted but expect periodic outages [update: back to normal]
 

The numbers on the server are going through the roof. An hour ago each time it came back up they couldn't get in quick enough to login and work to get it stable because the load was so high.

Needless to say this was an event I didn't plan for, but they're working wth us now to try and keep things stable. But I've been warned to possibly expect 3-minute outages or so along the way. It's going to be quite a day.

UPDATE: SINCE THIS WAS FROM EARLIER TODAY THINGS ARE BACK TO NORMAL

Ian

Re: We're being assisted but expect periodic outages
 

Thanks for the update...you are doing a GREAT job..and I really doubt anyone thought today and yesterday would be as BUSY as it has been...Thanks again..for the great site!!!!

Re: We're being assisted but expect periodic outages
 

thanks for taking the fall, ian, but we all know that it's all Belichick's fault for trading Seymour...i just know that the "New England Patriots are a team that hates their coach" now...:eek:

(this is a pretty emotional day, so in case someone's on a hair trigger out there, I'll cover myself by adding that I'm just kidding and channeling a well-known ex NFL'er Mediot)

Re: We're being assisted but expect periodic outages
 

This situation is best explained by borrowing the famous words of Laurence Maroney.

The server ... when there is huge Pats news ... blows it's wad too early.;)

Re: We're being assisted but expect periodic outages
 

God I hope when the news later this week breaks out about Brady being traded to the Broncos for Orton and a 2010 first rounder it doesn't screw up the site again! :eek::eek::cool::o

Re: We're being assisted but expect periodic outages
 

I enjoy this site and get more news on here than anywhere else. Its a shame
it seems to crash a lot.
I wish you the best in getting it resolved.

Re: We're being assisted but expect periodic outages
 

Suggestion 1: Lose the photos in the signature files.

Suggestion 2: Google on vBulletin caching. If you do so regularly, do so again. ;) There are a LOT of options. I'd be surprised if you hadn't tried several, but I'd also be surprised if you'd examined all of the reasonable ones.

Re: We're being assisted but expect periodic outages
 

come on.......lets celebrate the beginning of the season by getting the donations up closer to the 312 target......or Ian,go to a nice round figure of $25 per year.

....jeez....I got more than that back with the nice T-shirt and the surprise additions.

Ian,at least let some people volunteer to pay $25/yr.

Oh.....BTW,I'm disabled and live on SSDI....so I don't want people to think I'm some rich guy with money to burn.
Peter

Re: We're being assisted but expect periodic outages
 

That's only part of the problem - and at this stage not easily fixable. Once the changeover occurs I'll be dumping the images out of the database and onto the main server, which will lighten the load a bit, but I can't do it now because it will time out and mess things up horribly. Dumping over half of the DB (over a 1G of data) did a great job in speeding things up normally, but that doesn't fix the in/out problem that goes on when thousands of people decend out of nowhere as they did today. It was ugly and there were so many people here that each time it came back up, the load shot right up immediately and there were mere seconds to take a shot at shutting things down so we could work on things. It took like four or five tries before we could finally get in :mad:

It was a long day to say the least. I was actually heading out the door with my family for breakfast around 10:30 or so when the news of Seymour broke and all hell broke loose here. We finally left at 1:00 while they took it back down to upgrade Plesk and made some memory related configuration changes, - so my wife was less than impressed.

Hopefully we'll have the other server installed later this week, which will house the database and should speed things up quite a bit. We're also upgrading the processor in this one.

I'll then be sending out a mass e-mail to invite everyone to hit it just like a game day to test it. Because I am beyond done with dealing with this believe me :explative

Re: We're being assisted but expect periodic outages
 

This week it will finally be over. Probably Thursday or Friday, so I'll keep everyone updated.

Ian