Any news on the DU server issues?

[meldroc]

Just curious - the servers have been bogged down for weeks now. Currently, it's at level two, which turns off a whole bunch of features (I miss advanced search.) IIRC, Skinner and the other admins were thinking there's a hardware problem somewhere that's crashing processes and slowing things down. Is there any progress in tracking that down?

[EarlG]

1. Here's the latest

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=820394&mesg_id=820852

Sorry this is still going on... we're working to fix it.

[meldroc]

5. Thanks, that does satisfy my curiosity.

As a software engineer myself, I know that problems like this are hard to track down, especially if it's an intermittent hardware failure - you can't get a repeatable failure easily.

[Phredicles]

6. Maybe the hamster running in the wheel needs better vitamins?

Just want to make sure no possibility is overlooked...

[NMDemDist2]

2. kicked and nominated. I was wondering the same thing

thanks EarlG!

edit to put the correct admin's nick in :banghead:

[wakeme2008]

3. Well the conversion to low speed Micro$oft Vista servers is

going just fine :rofl: and :hide: from EarlG

[Bitwit1234]

4. Did you ever think it is hacking...

Sometimes crooksandliars goes haywire. And Huffingtonpost which is quick to load just sits there and spins. Then my message comes up the IE can find the page. I have broadband highest they have and there should be no excuse for that.

[meldroc]

7. Probably not hacking.

As I mentioned, I work with computers for a living, though as a software engineer, not a sysadmin like Skinner or EarlG. Let me give you some facts.

Computers go down. It happens quite often in the business - maybe it's a flaky memory module in a server, or that last software update to the PHP code caused a crash, or that zillionth post filled up the hard disk and caused the database to freak out. There's bunches of things that can go wrong with a web site, especially one like DU, which has close to 100,000 members, and untold millions of posts. To handle that demand, you need quite a bit of hardware - multiple web servers, some of them handling the databases, others running web servers, others that handle tasks such as talking to advertisers like Google and serving up ads to help pay the bills. You've got dozens of cables, you've got routers and other network hardware, and all of these pieces do require maintenance. There are ways to minimize the single points of failures - using RAID arrays instead of single hard disks, using multiple web servers and database servers so if one goes down,

There are hackers and such out there, and some of them may be freepers looking to do a number on DU, but if it was a hacker attack, there would be definite signs. This particular bout of DU flakiness seems to be caused by failing hardware, and tracking down exactly which of the multitudes of servers is failing is tricky. It would be easier if the admins could bring down DU for a day or two - then they can systematically test each server with memtest & other tools and find the problem, but that would cause a lot of problems, so they have to do what they can while keeping everything running live.