Error 500

We all have since some days the 'error 500' issue.

I know Nuno's blog about too high number of users.

I have to contradict here.

Actually I needed about 20 trials to access boot-land.net.
When I arrived, the number of users has been 322.

Another about 10 trials to come into 'Support and Bug reporting'
Another 3 trials to open this topic. (now 341 users).

I remember in the past user numbers of about 1000. I once wrote a post asking for that.
(Sorry that I cannot try to find it. Currently it would need about one hour).

@Nuno: I think that these issues are not directly caused by the user number.
Since some time (If I remember correctly, it has been at the time of the introduction of the new Download) something strange is in the system.

In my opinion there is something wrong with the database.

Please check your changed *.php-s and maybe make a compression of your database.

Peter

Yes this is getting me crazy. What will happen when i'm at home. I haven't got a fast speed internet connection there (only 56k modem, thanks to german telekom).

Yes this is getting me crazy. What will happen when i'm at home. I haven't got a fast speed internet connection there (only 56k modem, thanks to german telekom).

I'm also sometimes 'thinking to become crazy'.

But then I remember the Communitity rules: "Everything is just for fun"

And fun can wait!
If it does not work, "Oops, ???, See us tomorrow". No reason to complain. Just wait until it is well running again.

If somebody needs WB results or functions commercially, he / she is looking at the wrong URL.

Peter

@Nuno:

Again big troubles to store my last reply with 474 users!

The server's issues do not depend on this rather small number of users!

EDIT: Five trials to store this post; current user number 364

NEXT EDIT: 3 trials to store the previous edit

Peter

It's really an excess of visitors and the server doesn't keep up with it..

bootdisk.com visitors are being routed to http://boot-land.net/winbuilder since yesterday but we still see many peaks of >1000 users at the same time, this is simply too much for any conventional server to support.

Now it seems that people from everywhere are visiting boot.land.net not just from a particular site and this asfixiating our community..

Let's hope things clam down again soon..

It's really an excess of visitors and the server doesn't keep up with it..

bootdisk.com visitors are being routed to http://boot-land.net/winbuilder since yesterday but we still see many peaks of >1000 users at the same time, this is simply too much for any conventional server to support.

Now it seems that people from everywhere are visiting boot.land.net not just from a particular site and this asfixiating our community..

Let's hope things clam down again soon..

Hi Nuno,

from my point of view a lot of (SQL) traffic is caused by the boot-land.net start/entry page.
It shows the last 1000 postings and causes therefore a very high SQL traffic just for displaying one page (HTML size: >2MB)!
Additionally this is the start-page of boot-land.net - usually the page with the highest hit rate....

I would reduce the number of postings or replace the page with a more or less static one.

booty#1

Hi Nuno,

from my point of view a lot of (SQL) traffic is caused by the boot-land.net start/entry page.
It shows the last 1000 postings and causes therefore a very high SQL traffic just for displaying one page (HTML size: >2MB)!
Additionally this is the start-page of boot-land.net - usually the page with the highest hit rate....

I would reduce the number of postings or replace the page with a more or less static one.

booty#1

@Booty:

You have been a little bit earlier than me!

After finishing all the NIC stuff of last (could be minutes, but really have been) hours, I wanted to post something similar.

In my suggestion there is one additional aspect:
Every user page request (regardless whether guest or member) is entered into the DB.
If used for statistics or whatelse, do not store every guest, but only every 10th, 100st?
If not used for statistics, do not to store guests at all.

Peter

We've never ran into any significant issues before and the referer from bootdisk.com was shifted to visit the static download page with direct links to binaries.

This resembles some sort of attack because it is simply a not realistic result and very few people can read the topics let alone post anything. The visitor reports don't also display from where these visitors are coming at all.

I've contacted the hosting support so that they can take a look and see what can be done.

Also disabled the main portal page as this might be where they are applying their attack. The large number of postings on the front page was implemented this way to ease google indexing of our pages to improve performance on google searchs and only use mysql whenever someone opens up the page (around 10 people per day) or when a search engine spiders up looking for new posts - we get updated listings on google on daily basis which is quite good - neither of both have ever hogged our resources.


Since day 21 we've passed from 60 000 daily sql queries to >300 000 queries yesterday, this is nowhere usual and I hope that things calm down soon.


We could also remove all extra addons to keep the forums light, but this involves too much time and work, also mentioning that it's simply too risky to tamper with our mySql databases probably get completely offline, let's wait a bit until this "attack" ceases.

Hopefully the hosting staff may move us temporarily to a dedicated server with enough conditions to endure this stress, let's see what they can do.


Don't worry - even if this annoyance continues a while longer we will still outcome these issues sooner or later..

This actually reminds me of a nice clip from Rihanna

And if the server continues to get hogged, we'll just keep changing things until we can get back on our feet here.

Feels nice to have a running server again. I think it was because the main page shows the last 1000 threads AND because the main page is getting reeeaaally wide. not like a widescreen in 16:9 format. I think more than one with a 20:0,5

Hmm.. Let's see over the next couple of days what can be done.

At the moment we're still getting too many visitors..

As i see you've changed the main page, cause it's displayed normal now. Now people do not need to scroll half an hour to find the link to the topic.

Now the site reacts as known from some weeks ago.
For me as a normal user there is no difference in the page appearing and functionality.

@Nuno: You wrote that you will restrict some functionality.
Just for my personal interest:
Which functionalities did you disable?

Peter

@Nuno: You wrote that you will restrict some functionality.
Just for my personal interest:
Which functionalities did you disable?

Most functionality is restaured - you can read the details of wich components were modified or disabled here: http://blog.boot-lan...ard/2007-06-29/

At the moment, I've just didn't added back the number of users in the last 15 minutes at the bottom of the main page and the 1000 pages on front page of boot-land.net, also left some other tweaking inside the forum software which were eating too much CPU cycles.

One of the internal changes with most impact on performance was the function to gzip the page while a user is browsing the forums or the update topic views counter.

This means that the site spends more bandwidth since compressed text files (a bit like log.html) use much less space when compressed - but also boosted performance to support the high number of visitors.

At the moment these numbers are decreasing and no functionality is restricted as before - we've got our server back to shape..

We'll be ready for the next "visit"

- we've got our server back to shape..

We'll be ready for the next "visit"

Good Excellent work, Nuno!

Peter