Site Downtime Notice

[Saru]

After a brief period of downtime the site is back up again, having experienced a server overload after a months worth of traffic visited in the space of a few hours yesterday afternoon.

The main page is currently down while some features are disabled to assist in bandwidth reduction.

These issues will hopefully be resolved shortly.

My apologies for any inconvenience these problems may have caused.

[Saru]

The front page is now back on-line, however the Image Gallery and Audio Recordings are currently off-line. These will return once I have found alternative web space on which to host them.

The poll and the store-rotator script have also been disabled, along with several images.

These things have been changed because they are the most bandwidth intensive parts of the site - and disabling the galleries temporarily should prevent any re-occurances of yesterdays server overload.

All other areas, including the A To Z and the forum, remain on-Line and fully functional.

Further details of the site changes in regards to the recent technical problems will be posted in this thread as things progress.

[odinsupreme]

SaRuMaN,

how much is tha bandwith you may use? Or you have really a huge amount of visitors or the bandwith you may use is not very much..

Was your site kind of "Bombed"? I had some threaths from a certain person who said he would that to me... I will not say the name of this person nor will I give you his e-mail address..

Odin

Robert von Wintersdorff (a.k.a R0bby)

robertvw@home.nl  :s8

[Saru]

Odin,

Under normal circumstances the bandwidth would be more than sufficient, but yesterday Yahoo sent out a newsletter and attracted several thousand here in the space of a couple of hours.

Nothing on this site is set up for handling that volume of traffic - it was simply too much too quickly and the server become bogged down. If I had known in advance, I could have probably made enough adjustments to accomodate the surge of traffic, but I was completely unprepared for it.

The host basically had to put the site offline until the problem has subsided. I am going to have to make some considerable changes so that in the event of another traffic surge, the site will be able to handle it.

Given that it was caused by a one off newsletter however, I doubt anything quite like this will happen again.

[albaqwerty]

When I visited yesterday afternoon, there were 110 guests visiting the site and 1 user, me.

Dunno if that info is any help to you or not but I did think it kinda unusual.

[Saru]

Odin,

Oh, and to answer your question about being "bombed" - I did consider that, but the logs do show that the visitors were genuinly unique, and all came from different Yahoo mailboxes.

Albaqwerty,

Quite a spectacle all those guests yesterday - I think the maximum it reached was 123 guests. The reason there were so few users in comparison to guests, is because 99% of those people were there for the first time, having come straight from the Yahoo newsletter.

Certainly not something we'll see again for a very very long time, if ever.

[odinsupreme]

Thanks for the Info SaRuMaN.

I stood in a newsletter twice, I got 400 visitors in 2 days, but not thousands. Was a small Dutch newsletter.

Odin