Day 2 back up
The first day up facing traffic and we did fairly well. The game thread got up to 150 and I saw some delays, but it never took more than a couple of seconds to get back to me, and we didn’t see any timeouts, which is good.
That said, I have to admit that I was nervous all day as the delays went from 1s to 2s to 6s. And for a 150-comment game thread? I’m not convinced we’re safe yet.
In any event, I’m going to be doing some tinkering with the site to try and help, and we’ll see how tomorrow goes. If you notice anything wonky with the site behavior in the next couple of hours, please drop me a line and let me know what happened, with as much information as you care to include. Or throw it in the contents there.
Like, for instance, seeing a blank page the first time you load anything and only getting served a real page on reload. That would be a problem I’m having right now. WTF is that about?
Update: seriously, wtf?
Update: That’s it, I can’t easily figure out why caching results in blank pages being served the first time, so I’m turning it off while I research
In the meantime — the plan’s to take the donation buttons down tomorrow and see what we want to do from there, so if you want to support USSM with cash, here’s your chance:
Off to tinker with caching — D
Like, for instance, seeing a blank page the first time you load anything and only getting served a real page on reload. That would be a problem I’m having right now. WTF is that about?
Yep – just happened to me.
Me too.
I had the error message below when trying to post a comment. Then the site was down for a few minutes. Well, lets see if this one goes through…
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@ussmariner.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
——————————————————————————–
Apache/1.3.34 Server at ussmariner.com Port 80
Yeah, that was something else entirely I was tinkering with.
I’ve stopped trying to get caching to work for now. Sigh.
And after I write that, I keep working and now I think I’ve figured it out. Woo-hoo!
So this upcoming TV appearance will be bittersweet, eh? One one hand, you’ll be like, “Yay! We’re on TV! Hi Mom!” and on the other hand, you’ll be thinking, “Gee…I hope our site is working…”
Paypal seems to be having trouble right now, dammit. Or at least they’re having trouble with this button.
Oh that is just awesome.
With blank screens and PHP it’s usually because you’re not getting a good DB connection, but you don’t have explicit error messages turned on, so you’re not getting the error blah blah.
Instead of using the button, you can always just login to PayPal and send money to Derek@ussmariner.com
I just assumed Paypal was generally having problems, but ConorGlassey was right. Thanks!
Maybe it’s my lucky charms, but I haven’t had any trouble at all, not now, and not when I used the PayPal button (granted, that was when all DMZ had up was the text editor).
So if we tried to keep our comments to a minimum, would that help? I guess I could refrain from entering “RAUUUUUUUU!!!!!” and “Beltre!” which is fun but which doesn’t really add anything to the discussion.
I conributed yesterday through Amazon. It was really easy. Apparently, if you have ever ordered anything on Amazon, it recognizes you, and you can contribute with one click.
Yeah, the Amazon route was way easy yesterday.
Suggestions for reducing the load on the site:
(1) Display only the most recent X comments on a page, not the whole 400 or 500 comments every time. Provide a link to older comments.
(2) Prevent excessive refreshing of a page. Perhaps disallow a refresh request from any given IP address until, say, 30 seconds after the previous request from that IP address.
(3) Ban Corco. 🙂 Just kidding, sort of.
By the way, why take the donation buttons down??
We could have a bidding contest. Corco bids to keep his posting access, everyone else bids to take it away.
We’d raise a ton of money.
Or Corco could, you know, arbitrarily cut down on his posting/refreshing since he saw that one post like he has since it came up.
Don’t worry Corco, we’re not serious.
Not *really* serious, anyway.
Maybe you should rewrite everything in Java.