Slashdot Posting Bug Infuriates Haggard Admins

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Thursday November 9, 2006 @03:45AM 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.

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What's impressive by FirmWarez · 2006-11-09 04:27 · Score: 0, Troll

Is how quick you figured out what the problem was. If this were some huge corporate entity, the PHBs would still be running around trying to set up meetings upon meetings...I think the answer to all technical problems is smart people with little to no be bureaucracy.