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Slashdot Posting Bug Infuriates Haggard Admins

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the this-is-never-good dept.

Last night we crossed over 16,777,216 comments in the database. The wise amongst you might note that this number is 2^24, or in MySQLese an unsigned mediumint. Unfortunately, like 5 years ago we changed our primary keys in the comment table to unsigned int (32 bits, or 4.1 billion) but neglected to change the index that handles parents. We're awesome! Fixing is a simple ALTER TABLE statement... but on a table that is 16 million rows long, our system will take 3+ hours to do it, during which time there can be no posting. So today, we're disabling threading and will enable it again later tonight. Sorry for the inconvenience. We shall flog ourselves appropriately. Update: 11/10 12:52 GMT by J : It's fixed.

5 of 262 comments (clear)

  1. D'oh. by NeuralAbyss · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Anyone could have made the mistake.. good to keep us all in the loop though :)

    And let this be a reminder to the kids - RTFM, twice!

  2. So who's the killer? by Rob+T+Firefly · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I wonder who posted comment #16777216. That person should win some sort of "I borked Slashdot!" award.

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    Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
  3. My Reply to the Funny Comment Above This by eldavojohn · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Uh, this is a reply to the 8th post down from the top (remember to use this like an array and zero reference). Yes, I'm talking to you, admdrew.

    You claim that the 16,777,216th comment would have broke it but I contest that actually the 16,777,217th comment poster would be the culprit. Since it should be able to handle that many comments if it is zero referenced, and it would actually be the one after that one that would break it. You laugh but these kinds of problems plague a lot of coders?

    If you don't agree with me, please respond below and reference my comment ID.

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    My work here is dung.
  4. 24 bit? by voidptr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why on earth does MySQL have a 24 bit integer datatype? On what platform does it even remotely make sense to use that in the first place? It's going to get cast to 32 bits for any arithmetic operations anyway, and on most platforms today alignment requirements are going to pad the extra byte in memory and disk, so you're not even saving any space. Why even give someone the option over choosing between 16 bit and 32 bit integers?

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  5. +10 by BandwidthHog · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Ten points for honesty!

    At least they didn’t try to make bullshit excuses. I respect them for being up front about the real nature of the issue.

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    Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?