07-09-2009, 08:46 PM
I'm happy to say silgrad.com is back online again 
[strike]I'll explain everything in a little bit.[/strike]
The cause of our downtime was that our database had accumulated so many entries that it started affecting the performance of all the other accounts on this server. Our provider saw no other choice than to suspend us from the net.
The sheer size of the database was not a problem, but rather the number of entries themselves. To mitigate the problem I deleted users with zero post count (there were a whopping 1400 of them, go figure) and I also deleted the private messages. But the bulk of the entries were related to the search function, as the forum seemed to have indexed 3,5 million words as individual entries in the database. I can't disable the search so I'll just clean that table from time to time. Our number of database entries shrunk from 4,5 million in total to just over 200 000, half of which are forum posts.
Hopefully this sort of thing won't happen again now that I'm aware of the issue of the number of database entries. On the upside it took four years to accumulate enough entries for our provider to suspend us, so it shouldn't affect us this way again.
[strike]I'll explain everything in a little bit.[/strike]
The cause of our downtime was that our database had accumulated so many entries that it started affecting the performance of all the other accounts on this server. Our provider saw no other choice than to suspend us from the net.
The sheer size of the database was not a problem, but rather the number of entries themselves. To mitigate the problem I deleted users with zero post count (there were a whopping 1400 of them, go figure) and I also deleted the private messages. But the bulk of the entries were related to the search function, as the forum seemed to have indexed 3,5 million words as individual entries in the database. I can't disable the search so I'll just clean that table from time to time. Our number of database entries shrunk from 4,5 million in total to just over 200 000, half of which are forum posts.
Hopefully this sort of thing won't happen again now that I'm aware of the issue of the number of database entries.
On the upside it took four years to accumulate enough entries for our provider to suspend us, so it shouldn't affect us this way again.