Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Downtime

I'm sorry about the downtime. I have reached something of an impasse. Something is just different, and I haven't been able to figure it out what, nor my various helpers. Suggestions to increase normalization or change to a different db engine are really beside the point. There is some reason it worked two weeks ago and won't work now. The number of books is not much higher. No new feature has been added. In fact, they've been taken away.

If there is anyone out there who is confident they could help—it's a PHP, MySQL site—give me a ring. I'm quite willing to pay $65/hour for competent help.

10:06 - Widget requests are now going through.

11 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

How very frustrating! For you, as well as for us! I wish I could help, but I'm new to the whole php/mysql thang. (Now, if it was ASP/SQL Server, I'd be willing to look at it and go "you know, I dunno either..." ;)

Best of luck.

1/17/2006 9:27 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I work in a programming department (though I am not a programmer -- I'm an office bee). I check around tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I don't give a hoot who shares books with me. I just want to get the damn things entered. So if turning that feature off will temporarily solve slowdowns I say kill the little bugger.

Don't get an ulcer. Not worth it. Relax. Meanwhile I'll go back to scanning covers. :-)

1/17/2006 10:12 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hey, if moral support was tech support, you'd be set -- we're all wishing you the very best!

As a librarian, I'm looking forward to your Sirsi Dynix web seminar -- is it o.k. if I plug your event? Weblogs & Libraries: Communication, Conversation, and the Blog People -- February 15, 2006 | 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. Pacific.

Sounds like fun, "see" you there!

1/17/2006 10:19 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I work with PHP and MySQL, but as a programmer/systems analyst/whatever, not a sysadmin. I have guesses about what it might be, but they are wholly unsubstantiated and therefore may be more harm than good. That said ...

1. First guess: the problem is not the number of books/records, it's the number of simultaneous Web hits. Has the site gotten a lot more popular in the last two weeks? I haven't seen the dreaded MySQL "too many connections" message, so maybe you're running out of some other resource -- memory, cycles. If you're using persistant connections, sometimes you seem occasionally get ones that freeze and don't close and slowly eat up your memory.

Detail one of your helpers to look through all your logs (apache, system, etc.) for some kind of error warning that may indicate a resource running out.

2. Sometimes when a table grows to a certain size the index optimizer no longer seems to optimize as well as it once did. Are your searches hanging? This can be fixed sometimes by handing the optimizer an index hint as part of the select statement.

3. If you're using LAMP, you probably have something like the Red Hat autoupdate thing. You say that nothing has changing over the two weeks. Did your server's version of Linux autoupdate anything?

4. Really grasping at straws here -- are any of your drive partitions almost full? There's a huge number of times where something odd was going on with the system ("at" not working, etc.) that were due to some partition somewhere filling up.

Sorry if these guesses are more trouble than they're worth or things you already checked out.

1/17/2006 10:19 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I tried to get on about 6-6:30 pm EST today, and the "too many connections" message is exactly what I got. So I'd bet that Rich Pulasky's guess number 1 is spot on. And it makes perfect sense--even if the popularity of the site hadn't been increasing, there's enough people around just waiting for it to come up that when it tried to, they all hit it at once. (I'm afraid I was one of those.)

1/17/2006 10:35 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Wishing you all the best, and hope it will be up and running robustly soon. I love LibraryThing!
- tripleblessings

1/17/2006 11:01 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

thanks for getting it going again TIm
liberryn2

1/18/2006 12:35 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I'm getting a message saying "fatal error (31)" when I try to submit an "edit book data" page or enter a book by hand. Not knowing much about computers I thought it might help you to know about this error message. Good luck with what is clearly a mammoth task, and don't forget to get some sleep sometimes!

1/18/2006 12:55 AM  
Blogger Ed said...

I'm also getting fatal error 31 when trying to delete a comment. The revision doesn't take.

1/18/2006 1:54 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Just out of curiosity, how will this affect those who have bought yearly subscriptions? Will subscriptions be extended to make up for the downtime?

1/18/2006 4:48 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

You are kidding right? you want credit for missing a couple days of a service that is basically free? Amazing.

1/18/2006 3:51 PM  

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