I've been trying to revise a couple of posts this morning, but when I save they stall during the rebuild process, before they send out the relevant pings. The screen simply goes blank. What's the problem? How do I solve it? And is it system-wide, or just me?
Posted by Greg at January 13, 2007 05:57 PM | TrackBackThat sounds like a timeout, which can happen when the system is very busy. The system *shouldn't* be that busy, though.
I'm taking a look to see if I can spot anything untowards going -
Okay, why are we getting a thousand simultaneous requests to the Jawa's comments system?
Very strange.
Posted by Pixy Misa at January 13, 2007 08:26 PMEither the server has gone mad - possible - or someone has launched a fairly sneaky but largely ineffective DOS attack on the Jawas. That was slowing down the database server, which could have caused the problems you saw. It's been going on for about 15 hours. I didn't notice before now, because the system has been keeping up just fine for the most part.
Posted by Pixy Misa at January 13, 2007 08:41 PMI've installed a fix for whatever it was going on with the Jawa comments, so let me know if you have any more problems.
Posted by Pixy Misa at January 13, 2007 08:56 PMI've found out what's going on with the Jawa comments, and had to uninstall my "fix".
Back to square one, I guess...
Posted by Pixy Misa at January 13, 2007 09:45 PMThat could explain my comment spam!
Also, could my problem be related to my trying to send too many trackbacks at once -- though the problem seems to be happening whether I am sending out trackback pings or not
Posted by Rhymes With Right at January 13, 2007 09:46 PMThat could explain my comment spam!
No, that's just due to dickhead spammers.
Posted by Pixy Misa at January 13, 2007 10:31 PMSending out a lot of trackbacks can cause the trackbacks to time out, but in that case you'll get a message, not a blank screen.
Posted by Pixy Misa at January 13, 2007 10:31 PMI've got to the bottom of the Jawa comments issue.
Rusty added a new feature to his template to make better use of the new comment system I set up for him.
But he had a slight error in the template, and coupled with a nasty PHP bug, the result was that when it displayed the comments it generate the page over and over and over. So for a post with 786 comments (as one of his recent posts has), it would generate the page 786 times every time someone requested it.
Needless to say, the server didn't enjoy that a whole lot.
Posted by Pixy Misa at January 13, 2007 10:34 PM