This most recent forum downage was brought to us by the hosing provider. Granted I was out of town when it happened, but essentially something was generating too many queries on the database, causing a server overload. You may have noticed the SQL errors and slowness recently, all stemming from this same issue. Because Z31Performance is hosted on a shared server, this impacted other users and forced the hosing company to take action. Their recommendation was for me to purchase a dedicated server on which to host the forum. Not wanting to spend the $170/month to do that, I persuaded them to give me an opportunity to remedy the situation. I am trying things to reduce the server overload until I can figure out what the exact cause of the problem is.
This server overload is caused by any number of things, including:
1. People using the built-in search function in PHPBB to search the forum - serach function is now disabled - please use google to search the forum
2. Spammers and Bots - I have implemented and am working on new anti-spam and upgrades to control the bots crawling the forum.
3. Lots of users on at one time - Less of an issue, but I have limited it to 50 concurrent users. We also seem to get a lot of guests hogging it up, so for now guest access is disabled. Because people can't register right now, this makes the forum inaccessible unless you already have an account.
4. Doing a lot of things at once, like opening new threads/searches in different windows before others have completed. please avoid doing this.
I have also made numerous forum configuration changes which will result in less server load. I am working on a better solution to all the above issues without any drawbacks for the users.
Thanks,
Jason
This server overload is caused by any number of things, including:
1. People using the built-in search function in PHPBB to search the forum - serach function is now disabled - please use google to search the forum
2. Spammers and Bots - I have implemented and am working on new anti-spam and upgrades to control the bots crawling the forum.
3. Lots of users on at one time - Less of an issue, but I have limited it to 50 concurrent users. We also seem to get a lot of guests hogging it up, so for now guest access is disabled. Because people can't register right now, this makes the forum inaccessible unless you already have an account.
4. Doing a lot of things at once, like opening new threads/searches in different windows before others have completed. please avoid doing this.
I have also made numerous forum configuration changes which will result in less server load. I am working on a better solution to all the above issues without any drawbacks for the users.
Thanks,
Jason
Comment