MREInfo.com

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.

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.

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.

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.

Might not have been the best place for that.. either way.