Hi all! The forum is troubled today due to what seems to be a heavy
traffic peak on GamesfortheBrain.com (I'm not sure yet what link or
mention caused that). Can't even blog about the problem due to
database issues... nor post to the forum (if you can, feel free to
tell others/ quote this mail). I will check into it in detail tomorrow
when I return from Berlin... bad timing! Restarting the server, which
my support did today, didn't solve the issue, and to improve the
situation I need real access to my server (e.g. to disable certain
GamesfortheBrain scripts), nothing which these Berlin internet cafes
will give me (I should buy a laptop!).

Thanks for all the emails alerting this!

Philipp

Yeah i had some problems with the forum, but Peter on the other the other hand, didn't. That was weird, and hope it'll be fixed when you'll get back Philipp :)

David.

Good to see forum back.
Thankx to Philipp & all other who worked hard to get it back

> I need real access to my server ... nothing which these
> Berlin internet cafes will give me (I should buy a laptop!).

If you just want something more compact than a laptop for occasional emergency access, consider the Nokia N800 internet tablet. I just got one for doing emergency maintenance of the Uclue site, and it does the job.

You can install the ssh utility, which gives you command-line access to your ISP (which I presume is what you mean by "real access to your server").

The screen is 800x450 pixels (very tiny pixels), which is enough to see how your website looks on a normal computer. (That's not always possible with a typical mobile phone browser.) The N800 uses Wi-Fi or Bluetooth for internet access – it's not a mobile phone in its own right.

yES, i HAD POBLEMS TOO

i think what i need to blog and manage are:
- standard keyboard, good screen, fast connection
- absolute ftp, photopaint, paintshop pro 4
- sometimes putty, phone to call support
- couple of hours per post session....

as a fallback an internet cafe pc allowing installations also works..... i will check out some laptops.

ps: the peak to gamesforthebrain.com might come back later today (daily wave form/ time zones)... i have to analyze what caused it to know more, but can handle countermeasures from home (e.g. there s a global delay variable between game rounds for that purpose...)

(via phone browser)

There was two type of error messages.

The first was "Unable to connect to MySQL".

The another message included this information too, but the directory path information was different.

philipp
If you require "- couple of hours per post session....", how do you manage such a successful & busy blog/forum
This might be eating up a big chunk of your day

You rock man!

Rohit, I quit my day job in 2005... my websites are my full-time job now, especially Google Blogoscoped (thanks to all the participation of all of you)!

Just fyi the duplicate checker for starting new threads is currently disabled, until I got the peaks covered (it's kind of slow today too)...

Oh, and here's some illustration from yesterday:

Weekly load
http://blogoscoped.com/files/load-2007-7.png

Daily CPU
http://blogoscoped.com/files/cpu-2007-7.png

(And the peak's hitting again, the server just got rebooted, and I'm looking into renting an additional server...)

Phillip, do you know where the hits are coming from?

And is it genuine traffic or some kind of DDOS attack?

It looks like genuine traffic, I discovered the biggest factor through an AdSense jump (when I want to find out which site is peaking, Analytics is useless, because I can't view all domains at once... I always need to go to the AdSense stats; Google Blogoscoped AdSense earning are down since the redesign by the way – around 50% – but I'll go back to that in a couple of days when other things calmed down...).
Now I *think* it's http://I-Am-Bored.com which links to a GamesfortheBrain.com game, and displayed 18,000 referrers yesterday... which is OK if it's just HTML hits, but imagine those 18,000 starting to play all those games (many of which are MySQL-based). At GamesfortheBrain, a visitor will cause 15 pages per visit on average (games are split into game rounds)! If it's not I-Am-Bored, then it must be e.g. a TV show mention, because those will always appear referrer-less (happened when GamesfortheBrain was on BBC Click, and I couldn't figure out at first what caused the jump!).

If it would be just any site, I would simply shut it down with a sorry message to then care of it later on, but there are exactly two sites where I can't do that as a hotfix (Google Blogoscoped and that games site). Right now, what I did was to adjust the game-rounds-delay to 9 seconds.

I can't even upgrade to a new server with my provider, because they changed owners (previously Schlund, now 1and1)... so I can get an additional server to just move 1 domain – GamesfortheBrain – but it would take me weeks/ be nearly impossible to move from old server A to new server B (downloading & uploading gigabytes of data, doing all the domain transactions, setting up passwords etc.).

Philipp, you really should look into Amazon's EC2

i-am-bored! I love that site

>> ...BBC Click...
I remember watching that episode. :¬)

Hate to double post, but i'd thought i'd comment on this aswell.

> AdSense earning are down since the
> redesign by the way – around 50%

I have a similar issue with my website which I re-designed a couple of months back. Ad impressions are up but AD CTR is down dramatically. I've been trying to find a way to get it up without reverting to the old design.

It's a bit annoying, to be honest, as I like the new design but the ad revenue pays for the hosting.

MAN!!!
Those mrtg graphs scared me

I thinks its time to move your busy & resource hungry sites like gameforthebrain to a new home, they do deserve a high end server.

1and1 might help you in deferred movement to the new host, but its still better than getting such high hitting server down by some error or just your sorry message hotfix.

Lets us know on the forum if any kind of help can be extended from anyone here.

FYI...
Just ordered a second server from 1and1. GamesfortheBrain was causing trouble again today and I had to shut down half the games. The second server is as good as the current one, so I could start outsourcing GamesfortheBrain.com to that server and see how things go...