Some server issues this morning....sorry

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webbie

Seasoned Moderator
Nov 17, 2005
12,165
Western Mass.
Yes, constantly learning. Yesterday, we had times of well over 200 people using Hearth.com at the same time - this worked fine, but it turns out that some of my settings allowed the computer to get confused after many hours of this.....

My admin guy thinks he found the problem and fixed it. We also will add more memory to the server, but hopefully the problem is solved for now.

On the positive side, this means that a lot of people are using Hearth.com - and our woes don't nearly measure up to that rocket which crashed yesterday!
 
I hope your advertisers have taken notice of this traffic volume.
 
Finally!! As of 3 pm Central I finally got in, man this is worse than withdrawls!! lol

T
 
Hope it's not my fault.
I posted a thread at mercedesshop.com (where they help me keep the 86 300E runnin) bragging about my new Mansfield install in which linked to my thread about it here and one of the images in it. That thread has over 200 views now.
 
No, it's just so many people banging on the server at once - there is plenty of bandwidth, plenty of CPU power, but I am a little short on RAM in the server machine. There is always a weak link in the chain, and we are quickly finding it!

Didn't have this problem last year with twice the traffic because the new Forum., QA and other stuff which is based on the new Software is much more resource intensive...of course, it does much more also!
 
my coffe tasted less pleasant this morning without hearth.com!!
 
I had to turn on the news to see if some catostrophy had occures no Hearth net. Then a calm set in some contracor dug up the power lines. Nah. Web wideow had enough of you in the cellar and pulled the plug. I had to search for logical solutions. Maybe it was not the excavation comtractor, but a tree clearing company with a run away Husky dropped a tree the wrong way. Then I remembered you bought a pellet/ corn stove for your new addition. Didn't you know, it should be a PE that it cures all even warts?
 
Sorry Elk, PE doesn't make Pellet stoves. If they did, they'd have integrated blade centers and the ability to order their own memory upgrades.
 
Yeah, the forum has been great, but this stuff sucks up computer resources. Think about it - we each sit at one computer....each more powerful than my server (a 1.4 MHZ Pentium) - and 200 people at once want to use stuff from the ONE computer. It's amazing that it does it at all.....

The thing only has 512 Megs of RAM - that was enough three years ago when I ordered the server. Actually, it would be enough now if it was not for Expression Engine (the new forum and qa and everything else program).
 
About 3 grand+ for a server like that with RAID (two disks) and rack mounting. Yeah, dual core would be nice. They are expected to come out with quad cores in the next few months, so maybe I can hold on.....although, as I said it's not the CPU at this point as much as the RAM. Watching the CPU meter, it is used from about 0% to 50% at most...and only that for a second or two.

Yeah, it's about time for me to fork up. Maybe Harry can mail me 10 pounds of those nuclar pellets...heck, they would burn all winter in my stove and think of how much money I will save. I could even break them up and sell some 1 lb boxes on eBay.
 
Yeah this morning the SQL errors on page locks looked like memory pressure was kicking the servers butt pretty badly.
 
BrotherBart said:
Yeah this morning the SQL errors on page locks looked like memory pressure was kicking the servers butt pretty badly.

Yeah, what was happening is that each display of a page on this forum uses three things...

1. The regular http web server
2. Php
3. Database - mysql

They all work together to bring a page....the web server program spawns a "child" (sort of another copy of itself) for each request.....and I had it set to no limit, so it was opening up 50+ web server connections, each using a few megs of ram. That left less for the mysql, and I think it simply went into confused mode. I also seemed to hose some tables when I did hard restarts....

The solution, so far, was making the web server software (Apache) create no more than 20 connections at a time. This leaves room for the other actions to take place and does not waste resources as much.

The enclosed file shows a list of most of the stuff running at one time. The mysqld is the database, and all the httpd are the web requests. As you can see, they are all shoveling out the data.
 

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Webmaster said:
About 3 grand+ for a server like that with RAID (two disks) and rack mounting. Yeah, dual core would be nice. They are expected to come out with quad cores in the next few months, so maybe I can hold on.....although, as I said it's not the CPU at this point as much as the RAM. Watching the CPU meter, it is used from about 0% to 50% at most...and only that for a second or two.

Yeah, it's about time for me to fork up. Maybe Harry can mail me 10 pounds of those nuclar pellets...heck, they would burn all winter in my stove and think of how much money I will save. I could even break them up and sell some 1 lb boxes on eBay.

Ok, theres 1200 members, every one chip in three bucks to craig, whats the pay pal account addy? The new mac tower looks awesome, fully equiped can cost almost 10 grand!
 
Sounds good to me.
 
Webmaster said:
Yeah, the forum has been great, but this stuff sucks up computer resources. Think about it - we each sit at one computer....each more powerful than my server (a 1.4 MHZ Pentium) - and 200 people at once want to use stuff from the ONE computer. It's amazing that it does it at all.....

The thing only has 512 Megs of RAM - that was enough three years ago when I ordered the server. Actually, it would be enough now if it was not for Expression Engine (the new forum and qa and everything else program).
Wow , You need to throw another lump of COAL in that thing and we better start clicking a few forum ad link . We dont want the Hearth forum fire to go out in December. :bug:
 
So nice of you!

But after looking at my bank account...and then at MSG's - I figure that I'm the one that should be paying you guys! :)

Maybe someday when hearth.com goes into full "free hippie mode" - but for now, the advertisers will pay the bill - speaking of that, Morso just re-upped as a GOLD sponsor, so I can afford the new server. It's more a matter of copying everything over and doing that right in the middle of the season....actually, the last few times it went off without a hitch. I have a great admin guy..the same guy who sells me the servers. He was actually in college when I started dealing with him. He knows all those little things about UNIX....there has never been a problem that he was not able to solve almost immediately....that's good!
 
Webmaster said:
Maybe I can stuff some of Harrys pellets into the CD drive opening. It would be like Popeye eating a can of spinach!

Ha Ha.
Watch that spinach ! You also might blow the the heads off the server with Harrys super charged pro pellets .
 
Morso just re-upped as a GOLD sponsor, so I can afford the new server.
Super , so we can now go from chittie , chittie bang - bang to John Force Castrol 1
 
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