I hate to bring this up for the umteenth time, but this is the worst is has been in years. It’s been borderline unusable for the last couple weeks. It’s pissing into the wind, I know, but it would be nice to see something done about it.
I second that observation. Jerry has posted a “board offline” message almost every day for the past week; it takes several minutes for some links to come up, and there are long delays in very ordinary places. It’s by far consistently the worst performing site I have visited in the last week.
Tell us, Tuba, what’s going on? Please level with us; we won’t tell anyone.
Hah, it has been bad lately, really bad. I panicked this morning and thought I was banned for an over-the-top facetious story about my dating life.
Now I am eating a BLT and enjoying the drivel with the rest of you.
If I knew I would tell you, but I don’t have any idea what’s causing this. Jerry comes when I call and fixes the problem. I don’t know anything else and I can’t speculate on causes because I have no information to speculate with.
I am sorry. We’re all in the bucket together on this; slowdowns and freezeups make our moderation job more difficult too. It’s no fun staring at a blank screen.
It’s bad enough for a free site to be this awful. But for a pay site there is absolutely no excuse.
People and providers need to be replaced. That’s all there is to it. Continuing to bump along is a Bad Business Model.
Now that we’re back…
Jerry! What’s going on?
Is the db getting corrupted?
Disk errors on the server?
Flaky network connections?
Or have we been buying cheap hamsters at Wal-Mart because CompUSA was out of stock?
The database has gotten corrupted twice in the past 4 days. When that happens then threads appear with no underlying post. One of the database tables ends up needing to be repaired. Before I do that repair I make a backup and then again after the repair has completed. The backups are in case something goes wrong in the process. They take quite a bit of time. I also resynchronize the ‘to the second’ backup mechanism we have in place. That takes hours but occurs after the board is brought back up.
As to why the database is getting corrupted? I don’t know. This is nothing new. Has happened off and on over the years. Is the frequency higher in the last few days? Yes.
Jerry
I blame that crazy rock-and-roll music the kids are listening to these days.
This post is what I was going to add earlier, but the message boards went temporarily down. The master of the domain has posted now, something similar to what I was going too.
My formerly constructed post, if it’s of any help.
I’ve been seeing all sorts of messages coming up. The data base seems to be getting corrupted. The message board software goes nuts, but is it a database error, corrupted code, or a server memory cpu glitch? Random messages I shouldn’t get pop up. The reason I shouldn’t get the messages is I’m not doing what they are meant for. There has been about a week of exceptional problems.
And the Reader has just been sold. (Cue ominous music) Coincidence? YOU decide! 
Weaning us? :eek:
Maybe the new owners are like those aliens from V! They’ve been eating the hamsters! :eek:
Nope. It’s those A-bomb tests made in the fifties coming back to haunt us. :dubious:
BTW, who bought the Reader? Anybody know?
Creative Loafing. Press release via the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies.
A few minutes ago I got a timeout on the main page, www.straightdope.com, just before I came to the mb.
Yes, I haven’t seen that brought up. In our “normal” SDMB timeouts in the past the main page was usually still accessable. In these recent cases everything has gone down. At least for me.
“Normal” timeouts… heh.
My observation also. I usually try to ping both IPs when the boards are down, and it always gets thru to both. That should mean something to somebody.
I feel like we are being kept in the dark just a little more than we deserve. Surely there is a common thread to this problem? “Jerry fixes it,” but what is being fixed? Is it a SQL failure? CPU hang? Grumpy hampsters? Do we need some more transistors? Resistors? Existors? Corpuscles?
How many times does Jerry have to explain it?
Thanks for the links Quixotic At least it sounds like Creative Loafing has a sense of humor.
Sounds to me like there might be internal integrity problem with data storage. Could it be a bad hard drive or faulty controller? Something at the gut level of the server?
If Jerry wants to take the board offline for an entire day to do a comprehensive integrity check and/or replace a major component that is suspicious, I would not mind. If it fixed the frequent, random, nagging problems, it would be worth it. What about it, Jerry? Can you pin the problem down enough that this would make sense? How about making an image copy of the hard drive(s) and swapping them? Swapping a motherboard? A blade?