Slashdot Mirror
Corrupted Databases Are Fun
Notice how all these stories are disappearing? Is it because
I'm a censorship oriented Nazi? According to my inbox, thats
the only rational explanation. The truth is that we've been
having database problems for several days. Stories are
randomly disappearing. Its making me really cranky. I
haven't been eating or sleeping much. But I'm working on
it. I'm really sorry about all this crap. Believe me, its
pissing me off more than you.
The semi-live threaded replies make this very difficult to do without a database on the backend. It can be done with a script that actually modifies the HTML each time a comment is posted but it would have to watch very very carefully so nothing else runs at the same time and it would take a while to update all the pages. Another way would be to have a master-index type of program which would generate each and every page from a set of text files but that would be ungodly slow.
Just so we don't have another freshmeat-like incident because of dumb people bitching, sorry to hear about the problems, Rob...but thanks for working your ass off keeping Slashdot going :-)
Everyone seems to forget that Slashdot has been growing by leaps and bounds lately. Don't be suprised that there are a few problems. Be suprised that it hasn't crashed and burned long ago.
Why? I'd guess that it probably has something to do with the fact that Rob et al have been busting their butts to keep it running so all the Slashdot Longhairs can make them feel appreciated by telling them how much Slashdot sucks.
I know I'm kicking a dead horse, but it seems that most forget that this is a free site, run by volunteers who care deeply about it. I'm not saying constructive criticism is bad, but there's a reason they call it constructive.
Rob, thanks for running the best site on the Web. Keep up the awesome work. (And don't OD on those caffienated penguins!)
Chris
"Wherever you go, there you are."
Have a cron job do a mysqldump of the database every hour - that way you at least won't lose as many articles. You could write a quick program to integrate in any newer comments using the unique IDs.
I hope you've paid the $ 200 for support and asked the mySQL folks about this. I run a much lower volume web site with mySQL, and I've never had any problems. But in case my sites become higher volume, I'd sleep a lot better at night if I saw a resolution of some sort to these problems.
D
Whoa...what's going on here? The guy (Rob) works full time to provide geeks like us with a helluva place to get news, and then gets flamed when it's not perfect? That's not cool at all. If you guys can't deal with a few missing stories (even though they're all out on the web, and just linked to from here), then you have some serious issues
In the end-thanks Rob, you're doing a great job, and good luck getting everything back to normal
Juiced? Or Not?