Upgrade?

I'm currently dealing with the ISP regarding the outtages experienced this weekend and today. I firmly believe it's a fault on their end, not ours, it's just that we're a busy enough site to have exposed the problem while most of their customers would not. I'll keep you informed but it looks to be a faulty copy of apache (the web server).

I had problems yesterday ( with the site), normally I go via my desk top icon but it didn't work. I have found on the odd occasion that if I go to caudata culture first I can then access the this site.

I too had a slight problem, but managed to get my daily caudata fix in a bit later

I've been told that we're greatly exceeding our memory (RAM) allocation - we're using just over 500 MB of RAM on a constant basis - simply put, the site is growing very fast. We are only supposed to be using 256 MB maximum right now.

If we do upgrade - and we'll almost certainly have to - the cost of hosting per month is going to at least double. In that case donations will need to pick up a little.

500MB of RAM is a huge amount for a forum of this size to be using. It sounds like something may have been coded inefficiently. Is this forum updated to the latest version of the software? But yea, I would check for something being broken in the background...

My $0.02 is that I know nothing about anything related to web hosting but will gladly step up with another donation to help defray costs. This site is too important to the caudate world to allow to function poorly.

Saspotato said:

500MB of RAM is a huge amount for a forum of this size to be using. It sounds like something may have been coded inefficiently. Is this forum updated to the latest version of the software? But yea, I would check for something being broken in the background...

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This is vbulletin. It's as good as it gets. It's not quite the latest version but there's a reason for that (there's a lot of features in the 3.6.8 that I don't want to bother with until the companion blog software is out of beta for a while).

As for "a forum of this size", this is a big forum. And we're talking about the whole site and there's a heck of a lot of traffic here (we are so not just a forum). I will admit I'm not quite drinking the provider's coolaid yet but the log files are starting to bring me around. I've a test underway right now that ought to clarify things.

It's worth bearing in mind that we have moved 3 times due to increased resource use over the history of the forum (nearly 7 years), each time to progressively larger servers.

Addendum: OK in the grand scheme of the internet it's not a big forum but if you do a search on google for anything specifically salamander related this place keeps coming up - google's crawler alone gives us way more traffic than I would like. That's all memory use.

I would like to thank the few people who donated (all previous donors) right after I posted my original message - some of you are rather quiet on the forum but you are very much appreciated.

I tweaked our settings so now we're running between 350 and 400 MB on average. I've also upgraded us so we are well within our memory requirements for the foreseeable future.

If the site goes down again I'm going to spank someone at the provider.

A spanking? You must spank them well, and after you are done with them, you may deal with them as you like... lol

Kaysie said:

A spanking? You must spank them well, and after you are done with them, you may deal with them as you like... lol

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Are you sure you don't want to post the next part to that quote? :grin:

Abrahm said:

Are you sure you don't want to post the next part to that quote? :grin:

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I'm lost...

Monty Python.

Ah I see. I have never really watched the movies. I've seen some of the old TV series though.

What floats on water?

"a duck" "who are you who are so wise in the ways of science?" "Aurther, King of the Britons"