Recent forum downtime

[Editor Bob]

There was more unintentional downtime this evening, sorry about that.

Over the past few weeks I thought we had nailed down what was causing these periodic crashes, but obviously not. Will keep on searching.

We were offline this evening from around 7pm to 9pm.

During a crash we generally update the Facebook page so that you know the status:

http://www.facebook.com/efswitzerland

For those of a technical interest, we're running on an dual quad-core server (i.e. 8 CPUs) and usually during the day we're at 50% to 60% load. At night that drops to 15% to 20%. When it spikes to 100% or more then things tend to fall over, the database gets corrupt, and repairing it takes about half an hour.

[Upthehatters2008]

...and is the database server on the same hardware as the Web server ?

[Editor Bob]

Yes. Database on same machine as Apache.

[Upthehatters2008]

I would split that hardware into two VM's and isolate the user/Apache spikes from the DB, which seems to get itself tied into knots due to lack of resource and/or vice versa...

Just another Web DBA throwing his 2 penneth in... I saw the same problems when I worked for Online Casinos using MySQL

[Editor Bob]

You could be right. We've got about 99% uptime at the moment. 99.999% would be better though. My drinking time this evening was ruined.

[Sundog]

	Quote:	Editor Bob
	For those of a technical interest, we're running on an dual quad-core server (i.e. 8 CPUs) and usually during the day we're at 50% to 60% load. At night that drops to 15% to 20%. When it spikes to 100% or more then things tend to fall over, the database gets corrupt, and repairing it takes about half an hour.

All of those CPU cores don't make any difference if you're I/O bound.

[Editor Bob]

Random bit of info... our stats from Pingdom:



99.574 % uptime over the last 17 months.

Not too bad, but room for improvement.

[jrspet]

A tool to check if you are not alone in the event you suspect the forum and / or server in Manchester in down:

http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/

i.e.

http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/englishforum.ch

Optionally, send an email to team@englishforum.ch together with your EF username.