Forum crashed

[steve]

Hi folks,

Apologies for the down time today. The website was suspended due to excess database resource usage. I don't know what happened (the site has been functioning smoothly for me for nearly a year), but hopefully it was just a temporary hiccough. If it happens again, I'll leave a message on the main forum page while I try to bring the forum software up to date.

cheers,
-steve

[steve]

Hi folks,

With the help of the hosting company, I think I have tracked down the problem (the sessions table got too unwieldy because some spider/bot hammered the site with 7500 parallel sessions). I've turned down the maximum number of sessions possible to 50, at which point the site will automatically go offline. This should be more than enough for normal operation, but should prevent the server being shut off when the site gets hammered.

I'm still going to work on migrating the site to a newer version of the software, but having poked around a bit yesterday, that's probably going to take a while.

In the meantime, if you notice the red bar at the top of the forum page which says the site is inactive, please try again in a few minutes. If the forum is down more often than up, I'll try and come up with a better solution.

cheers,
-steve

[Maris]

More power to you steve. Very much thank you.

[Mick Fagan]

Steve, many thanks for your efforts, and as for being offline due to bots doing their fiendish hammering; that is pretty much the norm these days it seems.

We'll live with it.