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Quote from: Skuld-chan on 13-Jan-2011 (Thu) @ 10:58:31That is a very good question. On one had we have the fact that there were so few entries. Also, we have the fact that my hard drive died on my laptop which contained the entries. And, we don't yet have all the members back that submitted entries, so that is kind of unfair...on both sides of the equation.This sounds fair enough.
After all, a lot of hard work went into those entries, so I don't feel quite right just throwing it all away. Give me some time to ponder about it.
right away, while now I click on : ) and see a colon and right paranthesis.Quote from: Takeda Kenji on 10-Jan-2011 (Mon) @ 10:08:23ahh ok and good to see site back. but in my opinion a few things some of you have to rememberQuote from: Skuld-chan on 10-Jan-2011 (Mon) @ 09:25:50Agreed. The FTP in it's original form was probably not the best idea. However, I do have a few idea of what may have slowed down the site so much:I do appreciate that you know your lingo and such. But as far as I could tell as a layman, you just went on about speed when the real problem is the goddamn server DYING. How exactly do you plan to safeguard against that? Can it be safeguarded against?
1. The server hardware IS old. The server itself is only a Pentium III with 1 GB of RAM. The two network cards that were installed were only functioning at 10 Mbps (which should have been fine - read on.)
2. The operating system was antiquated. Over the years, I have tried to keep up on updates and the such. However, in the process of tweaking, and installing / removing various software to make the server and site function, I was unable to install the latest updates (for almost a year).
3. Bloat software. Mentioned above, I tried installing and removed unnecessary software to the server. This may have left bits and pieces of dead software on the system. I think a combination of this and #2, prevented me from updating the OS.
4. The internal network card (we are protected by a firewall here as well) was only operating at 1-3 Kbps. That should not have affected you guys at all, but I am starting to question if the external network card was operating at full speed as well.
5. There were redundant firewall programs. I've tried a few over the years. See issue #3. This may have been causing a bottle neck.
6. The FTP was a public FTP. This means that anybody, including google bots could have been downloading content. Also I had reduced the anonymous speed to direct the bandwidth more towards the forum instead.
7. I can't forget that the forum may not have been configured for optimum performance. I was in a rush to get the forum back up the last time it crashed, so I overlooked quite a few things. Including something that Jibril found in an external article related to SEO just hours before the server went off line.
Now, I've attempted to fix a few things. I've replaced both network cards with gigabit cards (10/100/1000), and both of which are operating at Full Duplex mode at 100 Mbps speed. I've only installed the most recent firewall application and we have a very slim definition file as opposed to the massive one we had before (which may have had conflicts contained within it). The FTP will be member login from now on. We have a brand new fresh install of the forum, and I am taking my time making sure that I get all the options set correctly for optimum performance.
Also related to this is the database engine. The old forum used what is known as MYISAM which is a basic database structure, and it is easily recoverable. The problem with this mode is that it is somewhat slow. Then there is INNODB, this is a much more resilient database engine, and is much faster than MYISAM, however, it can become corrupted somewhat easily if you don't constantly keep up on it. This is something of a problem with the last site, is that this INNODB (a recommended feature to enable for optimization of the forum) was corrupted, and I had tried to fix this without success. Now that we have a clean install, I can re-enable this feature again without concern.
So, all that is left that I can do is upgrade the rest of the components (which should be coming very soon), and possibly subscribe to a higher speed DSL connection.
I think that was everything i wanted to say. Thanks for your support and ideas!
My point in bringing up the FTP was that it and all the files on here made the whole server size larger than it needed to be. Maybe I'm wrong.
Do you have any comments regarding making sure the site doesn't die again? Is this something that backups would solve?