We're back

You may have noticed that the AOTY feeds at the bottom of the left column are disabled right now.  The problem was related to that.  As soon as I have it figured out, I'll re-enable them.  But first I'm going to crack a beer.

-Allen

Good for you Allen. You've restored many of us to our online equilibrium. I just poured a local brew, Kodiak Brown, to salute your efforts. Here's to you.

Balance restored! Thanks Allen.

Dang. Thanks for wading through this issue. I can now go to work tomorrow. I'd need to call my son for a problem like this.

Ordinarily I hate Tapatalk, but this time it provided that aha moment.  I think I'll take this time to tell the story, because who else do I have to bitch to?

So I waited for impatiently for the backups to complete around noon, and had an oh shit moment when the sites didn't speed back up.  That then turned into a bitch of a debug session.

In the meantime ...

I had the server tech disable the backup.  No bueno.

I started questioning some SQL tweaks made to speed the server up.  Undid all of those.  No bueno.

I was still seeing some SQL timeouts in the error_log so started wondering if the new server was indeed overloaded and mySQL couldn't keep up.  No bueno.

I put the site in maintenance mode to lessen the load, but the slowdown went away.  Oops, it only went away when I wasn't logged in.  You see, as admin, when in maintenance mode I still have access to everything, even though you don't.  That must be a clue, but it still was pointing to an SQL overload.  No bueno.

All the while I was still convinced the backups had something to do with it, even though they were supposedly turned off.  I could tell the server techs were getting annoyed by my insistence.  No bueno.

The past couple of days we had been fighting a problem with the mailer.  There was a particular setting I had to do to make it work.  That setting kept mysteriously getting undone, so the server techs were busy trying things to debug it.  They changed a number of configs that I wasn't aware of and were busy debugging that to see if they changes something that affected this.  No bueno.

On top of all that we had a kernel update and reboot yesterday after the first backup image was started then stopped.  The backup software was out of sync with the kernel, so that needed to get update to enable the backups to work. Did that somehow affect things?  No bueno.

Finally I took a break to play with my son.  But I checked tapatalk, and it was fast as ever.  That was a clue.  Something in the main site was messed up that tapatalk wasn't picking up on. I got back on my computer and immediately notice the RSS feeds that fed the AOTY updates in the left column weren't working.  So I disabled those blocks and BUENO!!!

I still don't know why those don't work. I tried other RSS feed and they work. I even tried an RSS feed on a testbed AOTY install on the new server and it worked!  Only the RSS feeds from the live AOTY site, still on the old server, don't work.  And nothing there changed.  And those also were working a couple days ago.  I'm going to table that for now until we move over the AOTY sites to the new server in the next few days.  Hopefully they'll work there, but if they don't, I have some more debug to do.  Anyways, if AOTY is down for a day or so in the coming days, don't worry about it, that's just me moving them to the new server.  If you have any AOTY entries approaching the 2 week entry deadline, please get those in during the next 24 hours.  I don't want to move the AOTY sites only to have someone complain they didn't get an entry in on time.

I know ... no pics means it didn't happen.  But that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

-Allen

I kept noticing that tapatalk was much faster than the regular site yesterday - guess I should've mentioned it.

Great Job Allen!!!!!  I can't even imagine the time it takes to keep things running smoothly.  I just surf and respond every now and then and I spend a crazy amount of time here! 

Thank you!  Thank you! Thank you!

Great Job Allen!!!!!  I can't even imagine the time it takes to keep things running smoothly.  I just surf and respond every now and then and I spend a crazy amount of time here! 

Thank you!  Thank you! Thank you!

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