[27-APR-2013] Sorry about the downtime

BLF Site-related Issues
1

Hi everyone,

Really sorry about the downtime today. I noticed this morning that some of the old posts were apparently being duplicated. I feared that it might be that new posts were somehow overwriting the older posts, so I pulled the site offline to avoid any further possible corruption. But after 8 hours straight of digging around, I’m convinced that these were simply erroneous duplicates of old posts, probably caused by a faulty caching mechanism. So the long story short is that there is no risk of data loss or corruption, just a bug that was duplicating a few posts, which I think I fixed.

Again, sorry it took me so long. Ok, now enjoy your weekend. :wink: Have fun!

2

Thanks for the time you put into this

Don’t be sorry, we’re just glad to be back

3

Hi SB,

I do this kind of stuff for a living (it’s what pays for my lights), and I have a theory about problems that you can’t pinpoint definitively…. that whatever the problem was, it’ll come back again. Not trying to be a downer, but just mentioning it…

Thanks for the effort bringing it back up, though!

Jim

4

Thanks, sb.

5

Thanks, sb! :party:

6

My night was lonely without BLF. I felt some part of my life is gone :smiley: Glad it’s back!

7

the site down message made me think of this dilbert comic (its not a snub of sb, just something fun)

8

Thanks SB, I was experiencing the dark times of BLF Withdrawal Syndrome, but it’s all good now.

9

Thanks Mr. Admin!

You’re the best. :slight_smile:

10

I totally agree. My dad always used to say that in the engineering field, “There’s no such thing as a fluke”. But I made a change to what I think was causing this post duplication bug. I run some pretty complicated caching mechanisms here— in-memory caching with a Redis server instance, APC opcode caching, caching of certain queries on disk, plus static HTML file caching for anonymous visitors. I strongly suspect that the filecache mechanism was not clearing expired entries and was causing them to be re-posted. So I disabled the entire cache system for now (except for the HTML static cache) to see how the site fares without it.

11

Its great to be back, missed you all :party:

Thanks Mr Admin for doing what you do!

12

For a while there, I thought BLF was a goner.
Great to see you back!!!

13

Thanks SB, thought you were trying to power up off that awesome conflabulation of emitters O-L put together….

Glad we’re back up, appreciate it! :slight_smile:

14

and I bet the backups were more up to date :wink:

15

Thanks for all the hard work, SB.

16

SB Admin ~

Thank you so much :beer:

17

I went on CPF, but they just bullied me and called me names. :_(

Marc.

18

The following text is an ode
To a man who's a wizard with binary code
Not a day will pass by
Without his watchful eye
Making sure we're all safe on this road

He fixes things with no delay
And all of our problems go quickly away
He has a light touch
And we owe him so much
For providing a great place to play

SB thank you for all that you do
This is the best-kept forum I've ever been to
There is no better site
To research a flashlight
Or share a good story or two ...

19

Hooray for blf. Thank you sb for your quick efforts.

20

And I’ll wager that this is the only forum that has a dedicated limerick poet onboard! Nice! :party: