Load Issues Conquered?

Here's the deal. Basically when I first created the php comic script Walrus, I coded in some bits that check for a "current version" image file on my server. Cut to 7 years later, some larger webcomics still use that old code, and at times my server gets nailed by hundreds of those requests all at the same time -- My suspicion is there's a web aggregator trolling those pages, but since there's nothing I can do to stop the requests from happening in the first place, I finally came up with a genius plan to divert them so the Newbsoft Server never even has to refuse the connection (which is what was happening for the past few years).

The gist of it is, now any time a request is made to either walrusphp.com or lifeofwily.com (the script's original home), it is first diverted to a google-hosted blog, at the domain level. Then real folks have the opportunity to click and continue on to their destination, and web aggregators get to leave me the fuck alone.

We're still running a little above the usual load, but I think that has to do with the Mafia.

I can't promise this has solved all our problems, but I've been monitoring the load very closely over the past couple days, and it seems like maybe we've got things handled.

At least for now!

Working on it!

Yeah, we're being hit by an extremely large number of page requests at the moment. I'm working to fix it now. :)

Load Issues Update 2

It appears the cause of the load issues was a faulty router, detailed here. Things seem to be working just fine again, and server loads is running at well below capacity.

Load Issues Update

The server has been experiencing some sporadic load issues over the past 24 hours or so. Things seem to have leveled out, but I'll keep a close eye on it for the next few days.

Scheduled Dreamhost Downtime

On July 11th, starting at 10pm PST, all dreamhost servers, including Newbsoft, will be going down for a couple hours.

Problems Resolved

Everything seems to be running smoothly, and has been for about 12 hours.

Major Dreamhost Network Outages

The server is experiencing a bit of a heavy load, which is causing some errors. Looks like there has been a major network outage for Dreamhost. Unfortunately this means there's nothing I can do about it on this end:

It would appear that someone in one of our data centers wrongfully turned off one of our circuit breakers. This caused a bunch of central machines to shut down as well as one of our network distribution switches. Once this was noticed, our admin team sprung into action to take care of this. Our services should be coming back online now and we’ll update this post one last time when things have leveled back out.

Read more here.

The problems should be resolved very shortly.

Server Back Online

There was a problem with the apache service. It's back up and running now. I'll keep an eye on the server load for the next few hours to make sure we're back at full capacity.

Update

The entire server is currently down. I don't have an explanation yet.

Heavy Usage this morning

I'm looking into it.