Slashdot Mirror
LiveJournal Servers Go Down
Wind writes "According to any journal hosted off of LiveJournal.com, the LiveJournal data center Internap has suffered a critical power failure, leaving all of LiveJournal and its content temporarily offline and requiring the revival of 100+ servers. Perhaps Six Apart wasn't quite prepared for the responsibilities of a website of this size? Updated information is posted here."
and search.pl is constantly being trashed by distributed xanga botnets. perhaps michael wasn't quite prepared to be an editor of slashdot?
"Perhaps Six Apart wasn't quite prepared for the responsibilities of a website of this size?"
Perhaps shit happens, and a blog service doesn't warrant the necessary investment to survive whatever caused this outage?
They all came back up when the power came back.
...)
But we intentionally don't have databases come back up on boot because if there was a blip, we want to do an integrity check first. (we run InnoDB, so it's ACID, but we're paranoid
We have clusters of 2 identical databases in separate cabinets, separate switches, separate Internap power feeds... so normally losing one database in each cluster doesn't matter: the other one gets used. But when we lose every single database, in all clusters, all at once... that's the time to be paranoid and double check stuff.
Because michael needs a beating. The site that rolls beta (alpha?) code onto live servers complaining and making jokes because another site goes down through no fault of its own?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Perhaps Six Apart wasn't quite prepared for the responsibilities of a website of this size?
What does Six Apart have to do with Internap? Livejournal has been using - and wanting to switch from - Internap for a long time.
I'm surprised to see that Internap's main servers are back up. It's pretty irresponsible to bring up your corporate servers before those of your clients.
That being said, LJ's servers are back up now, but they're making sure that the databases are all in sync -- LiveJournal has one of the most massive distributed MySQL clusters in existance along with a complete caching system.
They need to make sure that the database is all synchronized before bringing it back up -- chances are they're going to rebuild the cache too. If they didn't, the initial strain on the DB servers would probably bring the site down again.
This does however, bring up some questions about LiveJournal's network infrastructure. Danga (the creaters of LJ, recently purchased by Six Apart) are heavy users of Perl and MySQL. Needless to say, they have made numerous contributions to both projects and have developed an innovative memory caching system for linux.
The questions raised however, come from Perl and MySQL. Both are questionable in terms of scalability. Although I'm not qualified to comment on this, I belive that the general concensus is that MySQL is one of the least efficent databases today. Livejournal has 100+ servers. I honestly don't think that a system the size of LiveJournal should require a server cluster that big. It seems that they are trying to solve their performance/reliability problems by blindly throwing hardware at it.
Of course, I love livejournal. It's simple, easy to use, and is a great tool for building communities. Just as it is simple, it can also be incredibly nerdy (there's actually a command prompt!). They're also completely open source.
Hopefully, Six Apart can make their network infrastructure more 'professional' while still maintianing the community spirit that has made it so successful.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose