Server Busy

[Mills]

FYI. Server down for me from about 3:30 p.m. CST to 5:30 p.m. CST. Seems to be happening quite a bit now. The dangers of popularity?

[steven]

Don't think the server is down, but something weird going on with the forum database server.
Receive the database busy message many times but could still go to home page without any problems.
Also go through once or twice only to then on my second click to get the server busy again:)

Times like these make it all too clear how adicted to this forum I am;)

[FlipsidE]

DOS attack maybe? What is going on?

FlipsidE

[Avalonthas]

The server is probably just catching up with us posting. Heavy traffic, lots of users "idle", lots of old data in the database etc can all lead to such slowdowns.

Possible fixes:
1) Get rid of stuff older then a year (backup on admins drive incase u need anything, but get it out of the database)
2) If (1) doesnt work then just shut down the forums for like 10 minutes completely and let the server catch up. Just like a desktop if you do to much at once ur computer will lag tremendously and will continue to do so until you stop what ur doing for a lil bit and let it catch up and calm down.
3) Upgrade the server perhaps with some more bandwidth.

[FlipsidE]

Avalonthas,

Number three was done back in late November or Early December. This server is MUCH MUCH faster than the last one we were one. There is something seriously wrong. There have been MUCH MUCH heavier loads on this server (since the upgrade), and we haven't had a single problem with it so far.

FlipsidE

[Wazza]

Yeah I had trouble getting in just before, page cannot be displayed. Then it finally came through but said Server is too busy, please try again later. Can't complain too much, an extra 3,000 members in 8 weeks is not bad. ;)
Pekka deserves a pat on the back. :D
And a few free cameras from Canon

[Mills]

Yep. Something very wrong. Took me 45 minutes to make this reply.

[belmondo]

I first noticed problems this morning around 10:00am Pacific Time, and it's been pretty doggy all day since then.

I don't know what to tell you except that Pekka is the only one who can deal with problems at the administrator level. When things like this happen, we're probably stuck until he checks in, and we're not sure when that's going to be.

I guess we all just have to be patient. Maybe this is a good time to clean up our hard drives and do our file backups.

[CyberDyneSystems]

It's definately not Bandwidth... when the forum is working well it is the fstest forum I ever got ot by far now after Pekas major overhaul.

I'm guessing either a database "thing" (techinical term) or perhpas it was a D.O.S. attack...
But I'm just guessing. As Blemondo says. this is Pekkas world only.. so we can only guess.

Pekka will keep things running though! ;)

[NickC]

It was another Santy worm attack. Several of the phpBB boards I am on (including one I run) were dog slow today and had the usual extra ton of visitors that is the symptom of a Santy worm attack. Of course, Pekka has since converted from phpBB to vBulletin. However, the worm still was querying the board because it's based on search engine results.

I've noticed on all my board haunts that the visitor level has disappeared within the past hour. Now I can get into all my boards and catch up on my reading without waiting :D

[Mills]

Seems OK now, 11:51p.m. CST.

[kb244]

It seemed odd to me, because I visit both here and iphotoforum.com alot, right now iphotoforum.com is shut down because it got hit by the new phpBB worm, I thought at first maybe this site too was being affected, but it's VBulliten so I was at a loss.

[Avalonthas]

Oh yea i forgot bout those worms attacking phpBB and bulletin board. That is why last year I chose to start building my own forums in php, but i made sure all the security holes were covered. So my site wasnt affected :P