In case you hadn't noticed, we're having problems with the main site today. As much as I love traffic, apparently, an avalanche (for me) of traffic has brought the joomla/php-based website to its knees.
For now, I've reverted the site back to a static copy I had lined up for just these emergencies. Unfortunately, it's not a perfect copy so it doesn't have the latest content and some of the layouts might not work right.
I'll get the normal site back up and running asap.
WEB SITE PROBLEMS
Ok - things should be under a little bit better control. The static website pages had a lot of image problems but I should have those fixed. About the only big thing that isn't working is search on the site.
And oh yes...any of the new pages that I've added since February - namely the Italian pages and updates to the Canada pages aren't showing up. Oh well...I'll get that back up once traffic lets up.
And oh yes...any of the new pages that I've added since February - namely the Italian pages and updates to the Canada pages aren't showing up. Oh well...I'll get that back up once traffic lets up.
One more update...
I managed to get a fresh copy of the site offline and created an up-to-date set of static pages. So everything on the site should be current and everything *should* work. If you run across something broken, please report it to me. This thread should work fine for that.
I kind of rushed my first couple of messages here because I was in a panic, but here's better explanation of what happened.
Yesterday (Sunday) morning, a link to mreinfo.com got posted on a social bookmarking site: http://www.fazed.net/ . Yay traffic...sort of. You see, MREInfo is normally based off of a content management system (Joomla). Joomla stores all the website information in a database and creates each page as it needs them. This works great for making the site easy to manage and update. Unfortunately, each request for a web page creates load on a database server and it's not too difficult to bring a Joomla server down with lots of traffic.
This is exactly what happened.
I have some basic web page caching turned on in Joomla and that helped keep it alive for most of the morning. But as soon as I started poking around on the server trying to "improve" things, I ended up killing the web page caching and that's when the whole thing crumbled.
Fortunately, I had done some initial work a few months ago with creating a backup copy of the website that was just all static html pages. A web server can serve up these types of pages all day long under a huge traffic load and not even break a sweat. So I put up this copy of this site, which was four months old, and the site came back up and was reachable. Then last night, I was able to put up a more current copy of the site (from Saturday night).
I'll leave the site up on the backup static copy until traffic dies down.
I managed to get a fresh copy of the site offline and created an up-to-date set of static pages. So everything on the site should be current and everything *should* work. If you run across something broken, please report it to me. This thread should work fine for that.
I kind of rushed my first couple of messages here because I was in a panic, but here's better explanation of what happened.
Yesterday (Sunday) morning, a link to mreinfo.com got posted on a social bookmarking site: http://www.fazed.net/ . Yay traffic...sort of. You see, MREInfo is normally based off of a content management system (Joomla). Joomla stores all the website information in a database and creates each page as it needs them. This works great for making the site easy to manage and update. Unfortunately, each request for a web page creates load on a database server and it's not too difficult to bring a Joomla server down with lots of traffic.
This is exactly what happened.
I have some basic web page caching turned on in Joomla and that helped keep it alive for most of the morning. But as soon as I started poking around on the server trying to "improve" things, I ended up killing the web page caching and that's when the whole thing crumbled.
Fortunately, I had done some initial work a few months ago with creating a backup copy of the website that was just all static html pages. A web server can serve up these types of pages all day long under a huge traffic load and not even break a sweat. So I put up this copy of this site, which was four months old, and the site came back up and was reachable. Then last night, I was able to put up a more current copy of the site (from Saturday night).
I'll leave the site up on the backup static copy until traffic dies down.
From the linked site sorta:
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fusea ... =384227872
This guy ate an MRE and posted it on his myspace. Not the greatest orator, but a good read.
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fusea ... =384227872
This guy ate an MRE and posted it on his myspace. Not the greatest orator, but a good read.