JacobWell, we're back now and the site is running fine.
I'd like to explain the cause of our downtime yesterday, as it wasn't the normal case of "too many visitors."
Yesterday, as visitors came flowing in, a programming glitch was the cause of our downtime, although the Digg article triggered the glitch.
The banner on the sidebar of FOSSwire.com (the Oratos banner) was a handy little applet that let you readers know what was going on in our network. Each time a page was requested, the banner script would pull in updates from YouMakeMedia, GizBuzz, and FOSSwire at the same time and display them on one page. However, it wasn't caching properly.
The result: Each time someone visited FOSSwire, they the server would fetch:
- the FOSSwire page
- the banner FOSSwire article
- the banner YouMakeMedia article
- the banner GizBuzz article
Since GizBuzz is hosted on the same server as FOSSwire, the server was serving three times as many posts as it needed to.
Servers don't like that.
So, we've removed the banner, and now everything chugs along just fine. The same downtime should not happen again on this site, and especially later this year around FOSSwire's first birthday as we make some changes.
Major props to our hosting company for helping us solve the problem and get FOSSwire back online.
Sorry for the inconvience!
Jacob
