Slashdotted?

[liquid_sky]

What happned to the site? I loged on today to see this message:

 

 

Slashdot visitors: Normally there's quite a bit on this front page, but our MySQL server was getting hammered so we've taken it down to keep the site reasonably speedy. Of course, that makes most of the site useless, but it's better than being completely Slashdotted!!

 

Regular Visitors: Looking for the Message Boards?

[Alex]

The Lord of the Rings story was posted on Slashdot, a news site. It generates huge amounts of traffic and instantly crashed our database, so we had to make a low-bandwidth page. Once things calm down the old page will be back.

[liquid_sky]

Ah I see... well The Lord Of The Rings is worth it I think.. great find!

[Albert]

Crashed the database is not really correct, but for all intents and purposes it might as well have been. MySQL by default only supports 100 connections, and unfortunately every single page on AtariAge, with exception to the message boards (thank god) hits the MySQL database. I did increase this value considerably, but was unable to get control of MySQL because the server was getting hammered. So I rebooted the server and have not yet restarted MySQL. I think I'll leave it off for the time being, as it'll be huge drain on the server should I fire it back up. That's why we created a temporary front page, as well as a temporary page with information on the game. Not sure how long this will last, but certainly while that article is on Slashdot's front page.

 

..Al

[Ze_ro]

Kudos on getting things up and running again... when I loaded up the site this morning, I got a flurry of MySQL warnings and worried a bit. Then I remembered the LOTR release, and the number of nerds over on Slashdot (Yes, I'm one of them), and I put 2 and 2 together pretty quick

 

That was a scary couple of hours! At least I have my precious forums back to post in...

 

--Zero

[Rhindle The Red]

I guess this means AtariAge has hit the big time!

 

Congradulations!

 

I think...

[Albert]

quote:

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Originally posted by Ze_ro:

Kudos on getting things up and running again... when I loaded up the site this morning, I got a flurry of MySQL warnings and worried a bit. Then I remembered the LOTR release, and the number of nerds over on Slashdot (Yes, I'm one of them), and I put 2 and 2 together pretty quick

 

That was a scary couple of hours! At least I have my precious forums back to post in...

---

 

Yep, and the forums and front page are about the only pages on the site that are up and working properly right now. I've suppressed the errors you were seeing earlier (they were being generated by PHP, not MySQL), so now you'll just see pages that are screwed up, as opposed to pages that are screwed up and have tons of error messages in your browser window.

 

It's a learning experience for us, as it seems MySQL's default configuration doesn't allow for many simultaneous connections (100) and we were caching connections, which seems to aggravate the problem further. When all this blows over, we can spend some time investigating what we need to do to prevent something like this from happening again in the future. At the very least, the site should handle extreme loads with some grace, rather than spewing errors all over the place.

 

..Al

[Ze_ro]

quote:

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Originally posted by Albert:

At the very least, the site should handle extreme loads with some grace, rather than spewing errors all over the place.

---

 

Agreed... I don't think it took very long for the page to get overloaded... from reading the comments on Slashdot, it looks like it was gone by the 3rd post! 100 connections may be enough for most days, but that's nothing for Slashdot...

 

I think it's safe to say that Lord Of The Rings will probably beat out Elevator Action and Ewok Adventure as "Prototype Of The Year"

 

--Zero

[Albert]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Ze_ro:

Agreed... I don't think it took very long for the page to get overloaded... from reading the comments on Slashdot, it looks like it was gone by the 3rd post! 100 connections may be enough for most days, but that's nothing for Slashdot...

---

 

There are a few ways to withstand the Slashdot effect:

 

1) Take your server down immediately.

2) Put up a single, static page that's only about 5K.

3) Put up a kick-ass, multi-processor web server with 1GB or more of memory and a SCSI RAID array.

 

As I said earlier, I learned quite a bit today about MySQL, PHP, and Apache. I've adjust some configuration options in MySQL and Apache and most of the problems seem to have gone away. However, the site is definitely a little slower than it was before, but that's better than pages not coming up at all or being horribly disfigured.

 

I still haven't restored the front page, although you can get to it here. I'll do that in the morning, by which time the Slashdot article will have moved off the front page. By then I also hope the site will be its usual, snappy self. We may also investigate moving to an even faster server.

 

All I can say is thank god we were on a dedicated server or we might have taken a whole fleet of websites down with us. Then our hosting company probably would have been none too pleased.

 

..Al