| Website Problems Resolved - 11/8 |
Everything has been resolved from what appeared as a system crash on Thursday evening. Maria O’Connell, community and relations director, notified users at 8:45pm EST that there was a system problem involving with the site’s PHP core, which generates most of the pages on this site. The result of the crash was because there were many people on the site causing many executions of the PHP core. “This problem is pretty common with PHP,” said Anthony Zaragoza. “Even Facebook, the popular social networking website, uses the same PHP cores and scripts as we do and they also have the same problem that we had today from time to time.”
What caused most of the execution problems was with the advertisements. We successfully rebooted the servers and software and put the site to sleep mode until we resolved the issue. Sleep mode is a special feature programmed in the site to stop all PHP executions for upgrades, maintenance, or backing up. “It took us around two hours to resolve the issue,” said Anthony Zaragoza. “The site would start running smoothly then it will start displaying internal server error messages. With those messages, we then knew where the problem lied since our end we got the complete error message that can’t be displayed for guest users. Then after the fifth time of fixing errors we finally got everything working again and it turned out that there were to many executions being performed by over a hundred multiple users.”
“It is a good sign that many people are accessing the site, and we will perform any upgrades to handle more users at one time,” Anthony added. The last site crash happened in April 2006 which lasted for about 4 days because the administrators were unsure the actual cause of the problem was and Zaragoza refused to open the site up again before the issue was resolved.
