SQL Crashes on Forumosa- for the Admin team

Either it is my Safari browser or Forumosa has some tech issues to solve.
Pages are not loading and if they do - things are slow…
First crash

[quote]SQL ERROR [ mysql4 ]

Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock’ (2) [2002]

An sql error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact an administrator if
this problem persists.[/quote]

Second crash:

[quote]General Error
SQL ERROR [ mysql4 ]

Duplicate entry ‘1eb8471a5a14a566dcad3616966b28b7’ for key ‘PRIMARY’ [1062]

An SQL error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact the Board Administrator if this problem persists.
Please notify the board administrator or webmaster: admin@forumosa.com
[/quote]

I wish I could say it was your browser. We seem to have been besieged with more traffic than usual for the past week or so. And this evening, it all came to ahead, and we actually lost data in our table for the first time in memory

We’ve restored to our last daily backup. We continue to look into the causes and what we can do about it. For now, I’ll be upgrading our hosting to a higher capacity in the hopes that it will address the recent instability.

[quote=“Goose Egg”]I wish I could say it was your browser. We seem to have been besieged with more traffic than usual for the past week or so. And this evening, it all came to ahead, and we actually lost data in our table for the first time in memory

We’ve restored to our last daily backup. We continue to look into the causes and what we can do about it. For now, I’ll be upgrading our hosting to a higher capacity in the hopes that it will address the recent instability.[/quote]

Argh - indeed. These errors were not browser related. Too bad . Still this morning, pages / homepage does not load fluently ( on several browsers)

Upgraded the server about an hour ago. The server was shutdown for about 30 minutes. Lmk if problems start appearing again - cheers

This is really a shame.

One of my posts was lost, and I’d spent a lot of time and effort composing, editing and perfecting it. In fact, I’m confident that it would have been the stickiest of stickies in the classic post thread.

My Lost Post had it all. It had politics, culture, humor, religion, travel, Trayvon, teaching, visa issues, salaries, sex and sour cream…

It was controversial, and yet anyone who read it would have been properly educated and impelled to support my side. Tainan Cowboy and Chris would have agreed with me. The Chief and Buttercup would have returned to weigh in. Tommy would have stopped thinking about girls for a few minutes.

But it’s gone.

Perhaps if too much traffic is a problem, my post would have caused even more problems with server overloads. The views would have eclipsed Beiber’s “Baby.” So maybe it’s good that it’s gone. It was that good. It would have drawn a large part of the Internet to gawk and (mostly) praise.

It’s gone. What a shame. :neutral:

Seriously guys, you need to build a better coded site. This site is close to ancient and a lot of the code is going to become obsolete. Chucking more bandwidth at it is only half your problem.

Of course a DNS attack would FUBAR any website…

I really like using Forumosa, but compared to what is out there, it’s way behind. I might be asking too much though! Regardless to say I’m loyal kind of person and will stay whatever, please keep up the good work.

Cheers, Steviebike - I hope we don’t disappoint you

We are looking at a ground up re-install of the site. Over the years, there are a lot of abandoned modifications that have cluttered up the code and the database tables that Forumosa uses.

When you talk about “obsolete code” are you referring to moving away from phpBB? I do not plan to take that step, although I am aware of alternative forum platforms like vBulletin and Vanilla.

If we were to “start clean” - please post what kind of features you would like to see re-implemented on the new forum:

Recommendations
Statistics
Evernote button
Social networking buttons
Quick Reply forms

Youtube BBCODE
Wikipedia BBCODE
Spoiler BBCODE
PDFview BBCODE

[quote=“Steviebike”]Seriously guys, you need to build a better coded site. This site is close to ancient and a lot of the code is going to become obsolete. Chucking more bandwidth at it is only half your problem.

Of course a DNS attack would FUBAR any website…

I really like using Forumosa, but compared to what is out there, it’s way behind. I might be asking too much though! Regardless to say I’m loyal kind of person and will stay whatever, please keep up the good work.[/quote]

Thanks for your continued support and patience. We are listening and are actually adding some members to our braintrust that will contribute greatly to our future. More news to follow and please accept our gratitude for all you all do to make Forumosa the #1 English Voice of Taiwan.

:notworthy:

Stew

Hi Guys,

What you offer us is great. Nobody can complain at the admission charge. We get great banter and info. It’s a bloody good thing.

PHP, is fine. Goose Egg, I think, what you’re saying about all the clutter is exactly what I’m talking about. It needs a massive clean up.

Ground-up changes.

2 changes I would like to see are;

Smart embedding (not sure if PHP allows). If I want to post a youtube vid or and image link it can predict it (semantic?). This would be great than the ever-growing list of buttons that appears above the text input window – 25 and counting. Making the UI simpler is key, grouping things logically.

The forum index, should be arranged as vertical columns. This would help navigation to specific forum topics.

What I wouldn’t want to see is lots of flashy graphics that serve no purpose. You know kitting a 1.0L Honda Civic with aero-foil and big exhaust, all show and no go.

Cheers
Steve

Well, looks like the good ship Flob has well and truly hit the iceberg. Things seem to be going from bad to worse around here and while I’ve been a member for many years and will likely continue to lurk once in a while, I doubt I’ll bother contributing anymore. Over the years I’ve tried to be a quality over quantity poster and yesterday I too spent quite a bit of my time writing a detailed response to a question in the cycling thread, since as an industry insider I thought it would be a good reference to a lot of cyclists who may use the Flob, not just the OP, and contribute to the knowledge base here. Now after the Nth SQL crash in the last few weeks, the entire thread is gone as is everything else for the last few days.

It’s a great disappointment that a once great asset to expat life in Taiwan like the Flob flounder so badly. I supported the site through donations in the past and before Maoman’s departure planned to advertise here too, but while I know there’s more effort than meets the eye behind the scenes, this site is just not meeting the mark in terms of basic professionalism anymore and there’s a palpable feeling that recently the site is staggering on mostly due to poster’s force of habit in coming here, rather than it being the best English forum in Taiwan, as it once was. I hope this will change, but until it does, so long and thanks for all the sour cream.

I gotta find out where all this sour cream is coming from

I’m sorry to hear you are going quiet Plasmatron. Hope to hear from you on Forumosa soon

FWIW, our logs tell us that last night’s server restoration meant a loss of 20 hours of posts (we started daily backups in November) and the server problems cited only began last week (not “weeks”)

I added this bits to the part of the code where the SQL error appears:

$backtrace = "SQL error on request: " . $sql . "\nBacktrace:\n" . get_backtrace();
mail ( 'engerim@forumosa.com', 'SQL error on Forumosa', $backtrace);

I also increased the number of maximum connections on Wednesday.
So in case this happens again we’ll get immediately informed.

The server has been stable since the upgrade. Forumosa had a few out of memory errors before, not now anymore.

I guess the main reason is that the database is huge. You can go back in nearly 13 years of posts.
The oldest one: Oriented.org - Viewer Comments and Feedback
The posts table alone is about 1.1 GB. Totally we have 2.4 GB of pure text data.
This isn’t ‘just’ an average phpbb installation, For the “user experience” I take it that it is being worked on.