Site Stability

[bbadmin]

Hi everyone....

As most of you know we have had some serious issues lately with the stability of the site. Our provider I-Power Web has managed to fix our issues, but they are not very proactive about it, and usually I get emails from all of you telling me the site is down before they ever know about it.

I have never had an explanation as to why the site crashes, or what was done to fix it. The last best guess they gave me was that the message boards had exceeded the capacity of the data base that it is installed on. As a result they have deleted all posts over 90 days old to free up some space. Hopefully we did not lose to much data.

I have been gone out of town a lot recently, and have not had time to do much with this. However, for fear of being overthrown by the managers and or moderators, I will begin looking into "options" this week. If I decide to do anything I will let you know before I do it.

I thank you for your support, and for making this site the great resource and fun place that it is. I could not do it without the help of my great mods and managers. Let them know how much you appreciate them when you can.

Updates to follow.



Thanks,
Roger (bbadmin)





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[GearHead]

BBadmin, I use Powweb.com for my websites. They are extremely reliable and affordable..

[7idl]

you have my support ! [beer]

[Merl]

there is always EzBoard...


ok, ok, I'll now go sit in the corner for making such a suggestion :)

[Bumblebee Bob]

there is always EzBoard...


ok, ok, I'll now go sit in the corner for making such a suggestion :)

That's not even funny. :evil: Those are some messed up boards to try and join and post to.

[bbadmin]

Give the man credit. At least he didn't recommend myspace.com

[Gman]

The new smilies have come back to haunt you... :evil:

[BadShot]

So is there anything the geeks in the crowd can do to help? Are we just seeing a limitation of the BB software or a bad MySQL conf?

[PsychoI3oy]

I did some googling of the error message one of the last times it went down.

The error that comes up (exceding max_somethingorather) is apparently common to phpbb boards and it's a MySQL setting that can be changed either by the provider or the user, depending how the provider has things set up. It's basically a limit on how many requests can be pulled out of the database in a certain timeframe. Each reload or thread view generates several hundred requests, and I think adding the extra smileys may have been what tipped the scales. Then again we've also had moderately more traffic here in the last few months, so that could be it too.

IIRC ours is set at 10k and changing it to 50k should make it near bulletproof for the ammount of traffic we have. I think I remember reading that the limit could be removed altogether but I didn't really look into it too much.

If there's a shell account (i.e. more than just an ftp upload site or portal, the ability to SSH or telnet into the web server itself) for coloradoshooting.org on the hosting server, it's likely that bbadmin may be able to change the setting. If there's no shell account tied to the hosting or if the setting can't be changed on a per-user basis then the provider will have to change it and they may be reluctant to do so depending how powerful the server is.

[bbadmin]

Now you've done it. You've insulted the smilies.............






I'll look at this today.

Other plans still in the works too.

Thanks.


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[Gman]

Make it hap'n, Cap'n. [pirate]

[robsterclaw]

If you're going to look into other messege boards, I'm a member of a couple of boards run by xsorbit. 1 of them has a lot of activity, and until recently had tons of posts. Very stable and I believe the board owner said it's about 100 a year. He pays for it by allowing clickable links. We click them (and don't buy anything) and after a couple of weeks there's enough clicks to pay the yearly fee, and he turns them off again. If your looking for more then just a messege board site, then I don't know of any. [sad]