Cornucopia

A technical hiccough

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Our internet host is having some problems keeping up with traffic on this incredibly busy day. The problem is exacerbated since they’re also hosting some official election supervisor sites in Florida. We’ve had one hiccough so far today — about an hour and a half of down time — and we may see more. Just an FYI.

Our host writes:

We are seeing a rather extraordinary traffic level across the entire network. We are seeing intermittent and not too often failures in DNS resolution as both servers that handle DNS lookups reach their maximum lookup limit. These are termporary failures that are self-correcting as requests are processed by the servers. We are working to safely increase the limits to serve more requests while not crashing anything. We are also seeing some servers where all apache connections are in use on an intermittent basis. In those cases, we are likewise working to safely increase the maximum number of requests permitted on the most severely affected servers so that more requests can be answered at once.

13 comments for “A technical hiccough”

  1. We are seeing a rather extraordinary traffic level across the entire network. We are seeing intermittent and not too often failures in DNS resolution as both servers that handle DNS lookups reach their maximum lookup limit. These are termporary failures that are self-correcting as requests are processed by the servers. We are working to safely increase the limits to serve more requests while not crashing anything. We are also seeing some servers where all apache connections are in use on an intermittent basis. In those cases, we are likewise working to safely increase the maximum number of requests permitted on the most severely affected servers so that more requests can be answered at once.

    I am not fooled by this lame techno-excuse. And using the election-ate-my-homework approach isn’t working either. I’ll tell you what happened. Some fat computer support guy turned off all the electricity so he could steal those test tubes full of dinosaur DNA.

  2. It’s probably because Instapundit linked to Gordon Smith’s voting post at his own blog and the post containerd links to a thread here at T&S.

    Headline: T&S get’s Proxy Instapundited!

  6. Ebenezer,

    Not a bad theory, but not supported by the evidence. For one, we are getting zero traffic from that proxy link. (I was surprised by this). Take a look at the stat meter (which is public) — I just looked and saw no hits at all from venturpreneur over the past 100 referrers (which is all that you can see). We’ve probably gotten a slight bump from them, but nothing significant.

    Second, even if we were directly Instapundited, we could handle it. An instalanche gives anywhere between 500 and 700 extra hits on an average day. Today — a very high-traffic day — it’s giving Gordon an extra 800 already, and will probably go over 1000 by day-end.

    We can absorb that. We generally run between 1300-1500 per day; we’ve had days close to 2000. Our host isn’t perfect, but we’ve got 19 GB of transfer (and we use it!) and we generally don’t have problems with links the size of an Instalanche. (We’ve had big spikes in that past, such as when we were linked from Bainbridge and when we were linked from exmormon.com ). Not that we’re impervious — if we were ever slashdotted, for instance, we would doubtless crash in a millisecond — but the political blogosphere doesn’t command that level of traffic — yet.

  7. I hated using the term extremist in my post because there’s nothing scriptural about it. Maybe I should ask if anyone has an idea of what word(s) the scriptures would use to describe the concept of extremes, extremists, etc.

    Perhaps we could refer to some extremists as “scribes and Pharisees” as Jesus did in Matthew 23. The verse that came to mind is the one where Jesus sarcastically (or caustically) criticized them by saying:

    Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel. (Matthew 23:24)

    And then you have your famous “good extremist” Phinehas, in the Hebrew Bible, who knew just what to do with the couple that was enjoying a bit too much PDA in front of the tabernacle. (Numbers chapter 25)

  10. On a related note:

    I’m getting an XML parse error for your site feeds. Of course, I’m using Sage (a Firefox plugin) to find and manage my feeds, but is it possible that something’s gone wrong on your end?

    This has been a problem for awhile so I’m pretty sure it’s unrelated to your current server issues.

  11. William Morris–

    I’ve had the same problem using Sage/Firefox PR1.0. I’ll look into it if I get a chance.

  12. I haven’t been able to get in to this blog for hours and hours. Since about 3:00 pm today, until 30 minutes ago (10:30 pm).

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