I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that we’ve had availability problems lately. In fact, we’ve had four problems, and three of them may be fully addressed.
First we had memory issues, which I didn’t understand at first. Y’all would have seen them as memory errors or lengthy timeouts when submitting comments. The solution turned out to be pretty simple, and that issue is by now long since dead.
But: That solution would have been masked, to the untrained eye, by problem number two. The account all of the Splendorquest.com domains live on had been set to 25GB, max, back when we lived on semi-dedicated server. This wasn’t changed when we moved, with the result that we’ve been thrashing for disk space for a couple of months. Again, an easy solution once the problem was discovered.
I said nothing about these two because I still haven’t solved problem number four — which used to be problem number three — a significant overcommitment of our MySQL server.
But, in the meantime, we got hit with problem number three, a three-day denial-of-service-like attack. The villain was probably an itinerant spammer, but the effect, from your point of view, was just like a DOS action: No action on your end.
Meanwhile, problem number four persists, but in a seemingly calmer state of exigency. We’re serving a lot of folks when the sun is up over North America, and we’re shipping 200GB of data every month. Put this all under the category of growing pains, but it remains that our growth has put us in this kind of trouble four times a year, at least, for three years running.
And even with all of that, comes today a note from Mark Madsen congratulating BloodhoundBlog for making it back up to a PR6. We’ve been there before, so this may just be temporary, but it’s doubly amazing given our late semi-compromised state.
Anyway, thanks to everyone for the thought and effort — and the links — you bring to BloodhoundBlog.
Joe says:
"I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that we’ve had availability problems lately."
Yup, agreed however surprised. I know Bloodhound has the technological knowledge to be the fastest and best, so I am surprised when anything goes awry around here. Kinda like I assume my Orville Redenbacher’s will give me perfection in 60 seconds or less. 🙂 ‘
May 27, 2009 — 9:10 pm
Brian Brady says:
Congratulations to all the dedicated contributors are on order. While the PR6 may be short-lived, it sure feels good tonight.
May 27, 2009 — 10:26 pm
susan kelly says:
Whheeewwww; I thought it was my 13yo. Zwinky’ing on my pc again, or some evil ploy by my ISP to get us to switch to their NEW FOSys!!!!
May 28, 2009 — 3:20 am
Eric Blackwell says:
Givers get.
Greg, this blog is proof of that.
Best;
Eric
May 28, 2009 — 4:32 am
Mark Green says:
Greg, I have an extra Commodore 64 over here that I can lend to the cause if you think it’ll be any help 🙂
Remember the VIC 20? And if I remember correctly, its predecessor was the TRS 80 which I think was available at Radio Shack?
Shipping 200GB of data monthly for a real estate blog is just mind numbing!
Congrats on the PR6.
May 28, 2009 — 7:01 am
Al Lorenz says:
What a wonderful problem to have! Sounds like it won’t be long before 200 gig a month seems small.
May 28, 2009 — 8:50 am
Joe Loomer says:
Greg, first I thought you’d just blocked me, then my own memory issues kicked in, and I forgot your site wasn’t working, so I tried to come back, and remembered. Lucky for me, I forgot again and came back this morning. Voila!
Some folks say I have ADD, but I think they – HEY LOOK, A SQUIRREL!
Navy Chief, Navy Pride
May 28, 2009 — 12:03 pm
Karen Frederick says:
The explanation of WHY it happened makes me realize that I’m only beginning to get a grasp of just how much technology I am clueless about. PR6, even I know that is great and congratulations are in order. And I’m glad you’re back; I really enjoy the forward thinking, thought provoking posts and discussions that are hard to find elsewhere.
May 28, 2009 — 12:55 pm
Greg Dallaire says:
Greg,
You have an amazing community here! I’m a new comer to the site and am astonished at all the great contributors you have here.
Your growing pains are a sign of success to bad if it only felt more like that from the technical side.
May 30, 2009 — 5:19 pm