Sorry if my attempt at being funny was not as easily interpreted as I had intended. I wasn't accusing you of lying. The trouble with writing sometimes is that it lacks the audible and visual clues necessary to properly convey humorous intent. Honestly, I'm on your side. Mea culpa?baldeagle wrote:I'm not sure why you felt compelled to accuse me of lying. You obviously know I would have no visibility inside your facilities, but the traceroute shows that traffic was not flowing past your border router.
Just to clarify, traffic was flowing past the border. It just didn't get to the intended target. Potato, Po-tah-to... perhaps. But if I'm looking to be very exact, then I have to say that there was no routing problem whatsoever. It was a webserver issue, a few layers down. Read on if you want more details. Bail on this post now if it'll put you to sleep.
It was none of those, actually. But in the interest of clearing things up, I've reviewed the case this morning. Here's more detail than anyone asked for....So, whether it was a cut line, a switch inadvertently flipped or malfeasance on the part of an employee is irrelevant. From the outside, you had a problem.
After some software upgrades to this forum the MySQL database wound up with a lot of chaff (fragmentation). On a small board it probably would not be much of an issue. However you may notice that the posts on this board go back a LONG way. And there are a LOT of posts. That means a BIG database, and the database has to get parsed each time a request is made of this website (such as clicking to read a post, making a reply, etc.) The posts table had roughly half a gigabyte in fragmentation and that was causing the site to really chew on itself.
Again, on a small site, maybe that's not a big deal. The entire database on most of the phpBB sites we see don't total the size of just the fragmentation that was in effect as of yesterday. Add that to the site getting hit with peak traffic, then couple that with the fact that the site is just one of many on a virtual host, and that means that the load is already pretty heavy, and the server load spun up quite high.
In working the support ticket that Charles opened with us, our techs identified the issue and pulled the site off the network for a couple of minutes so that it would not be continually hit, which allowed resources to free up again and we performed an optimization on the database.
So it was not a router failure, a cut line, a switch inadvertently flipped, or malfeasance on the part of an employee. The site was simply pulled for a couple of minutes in order to get it back into "fighting shape" again.
Real story of the outage????? Not hardly. Please don't try to game an old pro.virtbiz wrote:If you'd like to get our real story, it's on our website here:
http://www.virtbiz.com/about/
Real story of VIRTBIZ. We're not CI Host. Never have been. Never been anyone but who we are, and I thought I'd post the link to our history for anyone who might be interested. That said, if you've found something out there that posits some sort of link between us and and the aforementioned other place, hip me to it, brother! Because that means there's some misinformation floating around out there.
Hardly! Again, perhaps I was not as clear as I had intended to be. I was mentioning that we were working together with Charles to help so that improvements can be made to the website and this sort of thing can be avoided going forward.Wow! So you're going to blame Charles for the problems?
By the way, and not to put a spin on it, but I think it's worth mentioning that this site generates a bunch of traffic. I said before that the site has grown a lot since it first hit our network. That's pretty exciting! Of course, it also means that a little attention may have to be given to ensure that things are running as smoothly for everybody as possible. Unfortunately here, the growth has really made itself noticeable with the little blip from yesterday. And that sucked for a little while. We've made ourselves available to provide assistance and support for Charles as he navigates forward and hopefully he has been pleased with our level of response.
On a personal note, although we have customers who pay us less than $10/month all the way through to customers who pay us tens of thousands of dollars per month, we got our start in webhosting. That's where we got our start, and it's on that business that we've built a sustainable business that puts the food on the table for a good little handful of people. I've got a soft spot for webhosting, which is why we continue to stay in that game in the face of other companies consolidating, independent shops falling and the rise of the monolithic providers. I care about texaschlforum.com. I care about all the sites we host. Not because I'm worried about getting paid for another month of hosting, but because I really love what I do. Even after 20 years in the webhosting business, I'm still an enthusiast.
So there you have it. And with all that said, I'll wrap it up here. Sorry to have ruffled any feathers. Especially those of a "baldeagle."
