Fooblog2000

I seem to have fai­led to note to ever­yone peru­sing this site for its foobar-ness that all foo­bar rela­ted posts have now been moved to my new site, Fooblog2000. I’ll no lon­ger be pos­ting upda­tes to my con­fi­gu­ra­tions here, which are now up to ver­sion 0.6 with some very nice new fea­tu­res such as ratings panels and a sin­gles SCPL mode.

With that said, the inte­rim period for the site, i.e. its ope­ning month, has come to an end with quite a razzle dazzle; v0.6 of my con­fi­gu­ra­tion made it to the front page of Digg and foo­blog con­se­quently suc­cum­bed to the effects of lots of visi­tors. Foo­blog uses Dreamhost as its pro­vi­der which offers 2Tb of band­width a month; I had plenty of pre­pa­ra­tion for such an attack, or at least I thought I did. What I was not pre­pa­red for was a catas­trophic fai­lure of Word­Press 2.1.2. To save the MySQL data­ba­ses from too much stress I tur­ned on the advan­ced WP caching sys­tem, howe­ver when 2000 peo­ple arri­ved in an hour or so something went wrong and all WP pages fai­led to load. Due to the stres­ses of such high traf­fic volu­mes I assu­med the pro­blem was cau­sed by traf­fic alone and that it would rec­tify itself when things cal­med down, I put up a tem­po­rary page and let it be. Howe­ver seve­ral hours later it was still pla­ying up, it took me a while to track down the pro­blem but in the end dele­ting the cache fixed everything. It’s a shame this hap­pe­ned because the down period of the site occu­rred during the period the site was on the front page of Digg. Oh well, I will know the fix for next time.