service blogfootball: blogfootball service message A Welsh boy stuck in the wrong country, struggling to get home

Next thing to do is get all my content out of Manila sites into my Radio site.

Wednesday, February 6, 2002

Took the main news root off the Californai machines and brought it back to good old Blighty.

Going to fix it here, on my kitchen table. Got the hammers.

Will send it back in a couple of hours, I hope. 7:07:42 pm

7:08:00 PM

I'm knackered, need to have some fresh air, so taking daughter off to big park for a few hours, when I get back this afternoon, I'll do that shutting down of just the news site. Maybe it'll make it faster, I think squishing the other databases has helped today.

So probably around 4.00pm till about 6.00pm the news site will show only a place holder.

1:31:56 PM

Gave up with the save as. It went through most of them OK, which took 40 minutes, then heroes root was running at 105 minutes... These things I've seen take several hours. Decided to quit out, and take it off the machine, bring it here, and do the squish, send it back, and reinstall.

But that'll have to be after I got some shut eye.

BTW: it's running nicely now... Lower volume, quick page loads. Maybe some of you shouldn't access it at lunch time, stay up till gone midnight, better then.

4:29:46 AM

Well things are back to normal on the concurrent threads thing, I can hit my site once more, been quiet for an hour or so now

For all of you out there who know about this page...

90 minute outage

I'm doing a save as copy, squishing all the nastiness out.It'll come back within 90 minutes with nice new clean databases. See if that cures some woes tomorrow.

1:58:20 AM

Tuesday, February 5, 2002

It seems as though it's the very large discussion group that's the problem. I don't think it's so much the traffic.

When these pages are hit 'it' looks through 55,000 messages and says, ah, I need this one. Then, it looks again and gets the next one it needs, and the next, and so on until it's got all the messages it needs, and starts to build the rest of the page in question. Now, that takes a while and to do it, it spawns a thread.

I'm seeing up to 45 threads running concurrently. Usually its 6 or 7, with a background 4 running permanently.

So, what this is telling me, is that there's lots of pages being built at the same time, and it cannot respond to other requests while it's doing this.

10:04:53 PM

This is just some of the messages I'm getting from the server. Don't be fooled by the sexBlog thing, that's just one site on the machine, it could just as easily be blogfootball.

Point is, The other server tests, that is, tries to get a page every three minutes. Every 3 bad requests, a message is sent. This is usually to inform me that the server is bust. But in this case, when I go there, I can see that it's still working and serving, but just can't take the load. Considering that these two machines site side by side, you'd expect that it could get pages more easily that anyone else.

More importantly, it's not getting pages regularly!

9:45:11 PM

TIME.com: Pssst. Wanna See My Blog? - I believe this is the first time in my life I've had something in common with RuPaul. The cross-dressing superstar and I have both started blogging, which is almost as much fun as it sounds. A blog, short for weblog, is a kind of spontaneous online public journal.

12:33:39 AM

BBC: I blog, therefore I am - Ever read a weblog? Perhaps you are one of the growing numbers who keep one. Or maybe you haven't got a clue what they are.

12:27:37 AM

Monday, February 4, 2002

Well, it's in. Bit of a problem while I was out, which I couldn't fix on a mobile phone and laptop. Zipping along on a train, through tunnels and no services zones. This was from 3.00pm till I got back from London at about 6.30pm.

I see lots of traffic, there's going to be some issues with the number of concurrent threads running, which makes the server slow. I'll keep my eye on this.

Some people have written with problems logging in. I think this was more the fact that the site itself wasn't available, as everything is tickety-boo when it comes to logging in.

11:36:42 PM

Well, that's about me done in. Don't know when the big root will arrive, nor how. So I guess I'll need to get up early tomorrow... Wait, I'm supposed to be in London all day tomorrow, usually leave about 9,.15am. This time though I think I got to take the car, rather than the train. So I'll get crash messages by phone, but will have to pull over to a service station to restart. I'll get Mac to have control over this, another day -- may as well make it now.

So don't know if I can install tomorrow or not. Possibly by evenings end -- midnight.

12:30:03 AM

Sunday, February 3, 2002

Oops, all of astonVilla.blogFootball.com disappeared. Back again now.

I'm working on deleting all these sites and tiding up. So, there'll be the odd crash, bang and wallop... Bear with me for tonight.

9:19:25 PM

More... Like poppies they fell...

8:09:49 PM

Another 61 sites, MIA:

7:58:01 PM

BTW: if anybody wants to me to re install any of these sites. Write to mac explaining why you ignored the warnings. He'll write it all out on lined paper and will fax the pages to me, I'll re type the pages in and you're away again.

5:54:25 PM

A role call of honour, lest we forget...

5:40:42 PM

I decided on 60 and then another 73 later. Looking forward to having smaller roots, this should make posting a message less sluggish. As posting a message in a large root -- thus invoking a save of that root, took forever not so bad if you're doing it, you know what's happening, but if you're trying to hit a page, then it can seem as though the server's sluggish.

From now on I'll limit the number of sites in each root.

5:21:39 PM

Ah, a crash after the chipper chopper finished. I'll do another 40 now, nah, make it 80, be bold captain!

Then another 40, that should take me up to midnight ish. I'll do a save as, that would take much less time, then we're ready for the invasion...

4:43:20 PM

OK 40 site are being deleted out of a scheduled 172. I'm doing it in batches of 40, as it'll be less stressful on the server.

3:23:12 PM

Third time, suspect that one of the databases is corrupt. I'll need to do a save as and copy replace to squash all that nastiness out. This is going to take an hour or so. So we won't be back up till around about mid day.

I hope people bookmarked my mirror of the service.

You should be aware that Sunday mornings is going to be the time that I do this save as copy replace, as a weekly task. It ensures that there's no on going corruption in the databases, ensuring the integrity of your scribbles.

11:25:08 AM

A few crashes at 10.15 and about 10.30am. Restarting again for the second time... What's this about? Friggin' Sunday mornings.

10:49:38 AM

Saturday, February 2, 2002

You'll also note that I've changed my URL for this page. It was http://astonvilla.blogfootball.com/service/ but is now http://service.blogfootball.com/ not that it matters much, both will work. Remember the mirror on the other server.

http://radio.weblogs.com/0001263/categories/serviceMessage/

3:06:03 PM

Ah! that's better, now my mirrors are working again. Also removed the caching on blog summary, even though it took 111 cached pages and only built 38 pages. That's a much better ratio, no point building pages when we can cache them. But the blog radar wasn't working. So till I fix that, I'll leave it off.

2:54:35 PM

Well, now the other mirror ain't working. Grr,

2:25:56 PM

Outage to report form 10:51am to 1:51pm... Didn't get my notification via email or to my phone. Why? Because I deleted the scripts that do that yesterday... Damn, adding them back in now.

OK, now I get emails after three minutes, and to my phone after 21 minutes.

I'll work on an auto restart next week once we've installed heroes.

1:52:34 PM

now at 10 pin bowling orange fizzy pop and chips

12:55:23 PM

here we are in early learning centre. Causing trouble and not buying anything

11:39:45 AM

Watch out, watch out, there's a 10.00 o'clock restart scheduled. I'm trying something new, er, I mean better for this regular event.

Should stick around but got to dash over to Sunny Wednesbury. Back about 11.00am if I get a message to my phone that all is not well. Otherwise see you later.

9:39:19 AM

Results of the chipper chopper operation. Bad email addresses. Here comes the flood of bounce messages to non existant email addresses

12:46:21 AM

I'm mailing wartning to about 200 old sites, if you haven't logged in in the last 30 days you're going to get a message.

Better log in then, eh?

Also, i'm deleting about 10 that have never been logged into, without warning.

This will take the next few hours to complete.

12:13:50 AM

Friday, February 1, 2002

Ah, I know what to do about this caching, I'll use a callback, every time a villa blog's home page is updated, I'll clean the cache of the blog summary. If anybody else uses the 'blog radar' please tell me and I'll add you to the flush cache table, if you're using turbo cache that is.

6:56:27 PM

There we go. You see the bug? The top window is in the browser Opera. I'm not as an editor of the blog summary in that bowser. But I am a member in the lower window MSIE. Spotted it yet?

Both windows were just hit or loaded. Can you see it? Yes it's in the blog radar, the top window hasn't updated the radar, while the bottom has. This is caching. The MSIE window builds the page dynamically, while the Opera window shows me a cached version.

I'll need to flush the cache once per hour, me thinks. Or something else.

6:05:56 PM

Righty ho, that's enough of the usual blurb, down to business.

Chipper chopper, me dears. The olde axe is about to fall, this time it's no scare story to tell blog weenies.

I've already deleted 63 sex blogs and about to delete another 65 over the weekend.

The only problem with this, is that it sometime crashes. OOOO MY GAWD, I hear you say. Well, this is not uncommon anyway. This machine crashes once or twice a day, usually. It's usually brought back up again within a few minutes. It used to run for weeks with no trouble, but lately over the past few weeks it has been some trouble. I'll figure it out, sometime and have it running smoothly again.

And when I'm away from my machine, I get SMS'd after twenty minutes, so I always know what's going on. I'll have to figure out a way of getting those cc'd into this feed.

3:44:56 PM

OK. Further to Marks kind words about the bugs. Please, please, anything that happens that you think is odd or bust or annoying, this includes speed of page loads.

The traditional way to report bugs is the three steps:
What I did
What happened
What I expected to happen

And include as much background detail as possible. Like your ISP, your connection speed, dial up, T1...

What operating system, and browser, and how many fingers you can type with.

You can either report them here, in this discussion group, or email me directly at steve@cybersaps.com.

3:36:11 PM

Ah! That's better. All working, present and correct captain.

3:30:18 PM

Nope, my mirror ain't mirroring... Hmmmm, let's see...

3:15:36 PM

OK, that all seems to work. Now then, now then! Call to order, gentlemen.

I'll be posting here, any services messages that I feel appropriate, or if I'm bored.

If you need to find out what's happejning with the server(s) this is the place to look. Ah! I see what you're thinking, "but what if the server's down? I won't be able to see this page!" Well, you can. Go to the mirror of this page here:

http://radio.weblogs.com/0001263/categories/serviceMessage/

You'd better bookmark this link.

3:02:38 PM

Testing, testing one two three four five

2:41:26 PM

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