Thanks for your hard work! As of 6:15 pm CET my site is now up, but it's still very slow. Please keep the status updates coming.
Thanks for your hard work! As of 6:15 pm CET my site is now up, but it's still very slow. Please keep the status updates coming.
Speed good now. Thank you!!
We love you. Thanks for everything. Rock on.
"Long ago, in a place both familiar and strange…"
Thanks for informing on what was wrong and putting up that "no it's not just you" update-page! The sites are still very slow to load, but they're loading. There's also issues with getting images and custom CSS, but it seems normal for now?
Good work on getting the site back up that fast! (you guys are definitely getting a new pro user what with how you didn't just stay quiet and leave us to look for news feeds with explanations.)
And just wanted to ask, were the reoccuring "nasty error"s (the error message's wording, not mine) that the site gave me when I was trying to update my site linked to this? I can't give you the exact error code, but it happened around nine or eight hours ago and seemed to cancel my last action. Repeating my actions enough got the update through unscathed.
The "nasty errors" are a quaint way of saying "oh noes, we are in trouble".
Images and custom CSS are still fragile. Something with the IP addresses. When we switched over to the backup server (which was kind of stupid because it never had enough RAM to handle normal traffic), we also reorganized the IP addresses and that is taking time to stabilize.
Ooh, I see now! Thanks for clearing it up.
And no pressure on my ultimately inconsequencial side for the CSS and images; as long as the text loads up, I'm happy even without the eyecandy.
(I'm sure that you must hear it often, but I'm glad Wikidot is around and isn't going to be taken down with "just a flesh wound". Thank you and the rest of the staff for this. *hearts*)
I'd like to add my name to the list of those who really appreciated the very frequent status updates. There's nothing worse than having a broken service and be left in the dark. I'm glad things are back up and running. Performance seems pretty snappy right now.
Still some problems with IP addresses and firewalls that make custom CSS and attachments not work properly.
Those !@#$% firewalls! I was beating my head against the wall a few weeks ago with a networking issue and it turned out to be the firewall - the last thing I looked at. I can't image how fun it is to try and manage the firewall for a large service like Wikidot.
-Ed
Definitely, when I finally realised there was a static page up, it already had quite a few updates on there… and it continued to be updated. A great help when people started bombarding me with questions about why the site was down! Thanks :)
~ Leiger - Wikidot Community Admin - Volunteer
Wikidot: Official Documentation | Wikidot Discord server | NEW: Wikiroo, backup tool (in development)
Yes, it was really good to see the very frequent updates coming through, and not just on wikidot.com but on all sites. A tough day for you all but an example of excellent communication.
Rob
Rob Elliott - Strathpeffer, Scotland - Wikidot first line support & community admin team.
Thanks, but I'm quite dissatisfied by our response. It took far too long to get a static web page up and to analyze the real cause of the problem (which was quite simply way too many people hitting the server).
Of course we're going to be changing the server architecture to be more scalable, but for me it's more important to get a fast communication channel in case of trouble. I think, when we get those "500" errors, they should always link to a static page held somewhere else. That already tells visitors "we know about it" if we do. And second, once we know the service is collapsing, we should just send all visitors to a static page first, whereupon they can click through to get the site they're trying to visit.
We also absolutely need to impose limits on how much individual sites can smash the server. I'm still not sure how a single site managed to do quite such damage. But since we took it down, everything is much faster, as you see.
We learned a lot today, though, and we hugely appreciate everyone's patience with this. I know how unpleasant it is to be without Wikidot. All day, I sat there looking at my email notifications from yesterday thinking, "if I read them, I won't be able to do anything anyhow… gaagh!!!"
It might have something to do with the fact that every time I searched for "wikidot" on twitter…. literally 9/10 tweets had snowleopard.wikidot.com linked in them o.O
~ Leiger - Wikidot Community Admin - Volunteer
Wikidot: Official Documentation | Wikidot Discord server | NEW: Wikiroo, backup tool (in development)
Agreed.
Thanks for the info, it really calmed me down… I sent an email to a google wikidot mailing group, but is seems you dont visit it any more…
If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegan. - Paul McCartney
You should visit their twitter for updates when the wikidot servers are down :)
~ Leiger - Wikidot Community Admin - Volunteer
Wikidot: Official Documentation | Wikidot Discord server | NEW: Wikiroo, backup tool (in development)
Hi Pieter,
Dan here, Master Administrator of the snowleopard.wikidot.com site.
Sorry for the trouble we caused…it was completely unintentional as I'm sure you know. We are just very excited for the release of Snow Leopard.
I'm glad wikidot is back up and running for the most part, but I saw that our wiki is disabled. Since it is such a critical time (the new OS will be released the day after tomorrow), and it has proven to be an invaluable resource for Mac users, I am hoping it will go back up as soon as possible. If necessary, I would be more than happy to upgrade to a paid account. I was thinking we might also split the page up into 2 or 3 sections, to hopefully lighten the load on the servers.
Sorry again for the problems and good luck with the system upgrades.
I hope to hear from you soon.
-Dan
I'm no programmer but, sounds like that something entered a loop that couldn't be stopped. Or some very rare condition has been met that triggered a chain reaction.
From what I read, what happened is simple. Too many people tried to access the same thing.
@wikidot my suggestion, is to have a small redirect traffic program, that runs to redirect traffic, if the cpu level is increasing rapidly.
Hi Dan,
You'll have seen the site is back up. We put on extra caching. What we need to add is live traffic analysis so we can catch this kind of thing next time. It's really not your fault: we all dream of making successful sites and you certainly hit the big time!
Thanks for using Wikidot.
-Pieter
Pieter,
Since Google Analytics is installed by default on all websites, can you tell us how many hits on this one yesterday ?
Thanks for busting your buns trying to get it all working again. We all appreciate what you do.
In case you're not aware of this:
Whenever I edit and save a page — or post a comment — it fails to update the page unless I hit reload manually.
~ Leiger - Wikidot Community Admin - Volunteer
Wikidot: Official Documentation | Wikidot Discord server | NEW: Wikiroo, backup tool (in development)
That's strange, because I've been editing for a couple of hours now without any problems. Page reloads automatically.