Site Woes

The reason we're having problems is this: All of the mu.nu blogs, including this one and other heavy hitters like My Pet Jawa, Protein Wisdom, and Confederate Yankee, are usually hosted on three servers.

One of those servers is down. Which means that some of those blogs have been moved to working servers. And it's not enough server power, not during peak hours, which just happens to be, wonderfully enough, when the most people want to get on the site.

I am pleading with Pixy to fix this and have offered to buy a new server or pay for an expedited fix of the old one. I realize I can't attempt a professional blog if people can't reliably get to it during the fat part of the traffic day. I'm also looking at finally paying a hosting company, though with the end of PJM's payments and ad rates currently in the toilet, I don't know how viable that is.

I share your frustration and I am doing what I can. If I have to pay $1500 or whatever for a server, I will.

On the upside, I am told the server is being fixed and/or will be fixed... I just haven't been told when.

Maybe the bigger blogs on our server have to suggest rationing to people during the danger hours of 12-3 Eastern, and ask people to just click once an hour or something. I don't know; I'm awaiting word from Pixy.

Who, to make this even worse, is on Australian time, so he's asleep during these outages and never can actually witness where the system is hanging up.

One Thing That Would Help: If you, like me, begin attempting to reload the site when you get a broken-link message, wondering if it's just you -- it's not just you. Please don't attempt reloading for a while, and if it still doesn't work in ten minutes, come back in ten minutes more.

When you're getting a broken link message, no one is getting to the site, including me, so you're not missing any posts or comments.

I think it's possible that when it goes down the situation is being worsened by people checking "is it just me?" and reloading a few times, which strains the server further and lengthens the downtime.

So, as a first fix -- avoid that.

Personally, I'm going to still do it. But I have to.

Update from Pixy: Ace has it correct - because of the dead server, we're overloaded elsewhere, and hitting reload doesn't help. :(

I should have the failed server back in action today, and that will solve the problem.

posted by Ace at 02:51 PM

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