why the site was down yesterday and today

Post by **cowsmanaut** » Mon Dec 29, 2003 11:41 am

We reached our 1 gig limit. I have gotten it set up to 2gigs/month now for the meantime. I think it was due to the transfer of the Encyclopedia forums (that was the beginning of the month right?) on top of the regular posting.

So it shouldn't be an issue in the future I should hope.. this though intensifies the need to not have some massive front page with all sorts of flash and animation and music etc etc etc.. something simple..

moo

beowuuf · Post by **beowuuf** » Mon Dec 29, 2003 12:32 pm

wow, that's scary it exceeded 1Gb!
also highlights the need for posters to include links, and not the actual large pictures/screenshots they sometimes do i guess

Post by **cowsmanaut** » Mon Dec 29, 2003 3:14 pm

does that count against our traffic if it's remotely stored? I always thought that if it were stored elsewhere that it would load from there even though it was shown within the content here..

moo

beowuuf · Post by **beowuuf** » Mon Dec 29, 2003 4:03 pm

hmm, i guess have to ask someone like christophe or gambit how displayed pictures work, but i assumed an image attached was displayed through the website when anyone viewed the thread
l

PicturesInTheDark · Post by **PicturesInTheDark** » Mon Dec 29, 2003 8:52 pm

There's probably an administrative option to view the size of each thread so you could check if you're on 1 GB and then see if pictures count against it or not...

Regards, PitD

Post by **ChristopheF** » Wed Dec 31, 2003 2:00 pm

An image (or any other content) always come from the web server it is stored on and not from the server where the page is stored.
So if we have an HTML page here on this forum with a link to a picture on another web site, only the size of the HTML page will be counted in the quota, not the size of the image.

PicturesInTheDark · Post by **PicturesInTheDark** » Wed Dec 31, 2003 7:08 pm

Then the 1 GB size is pretty strange - are there still a lot of pictures stored here in various threads (new engine developments) ? It's hard to imagine that this this amount stems from mainly text only...

Regards, PitD

Post by **Gambit37** » Thu Jan 01, 2004 12:37 pm

You have to take into account all the other images used on the forums: there are four themes, some of which are quite graphics heavy (even though I tried to get them as small as possible) -- each of these uses images for all the post icons, user profiles, backgrounds, titles, etc etc -- this all adds up, and you'd be surprised how quickly even small images can chew up bandwidth, especially as more and more new users join the board (existing users will likely have these images cached on their hard-disk but new users each have to download them).

Add in to that, all the avatars on this site can eat up the data transfer allocation too (especially when Mooman makes them 12Kb each! -- I recompressed them to about 2Kb each)

Just to confirm Christophe's point -- remotely linked images don't count towards to allocation, so no issues there. The only reason I've mentioned this to MadMunky before is that his images are so big (in resolution, not file size), that it takes ages to display them and it messes up the horizontal scrolling.

I think phpBB2.2 will help address this by making themes more editable and allowing colour schemes to be more easily applied, so that you could have perhaps one set of graphics but several different colour schemes. (This can be done already but the themes are all a bit of a hack job now and it's a mess to sort it out).

PicturesInTheDark · Post by **PicturesInTheDark** » Thu Jan 01, 2004 9:16 pm

I was surprised, that's why I asked. Thanks for the explanations; after checking the total post amount (some 17.000) I'm not that baffled any more.

Regards, PitD

Post by **Gambit37** » Thu Jan 15, 2004 11:59 pm

So what was the reason for the site being down for the last day or so? Is someone hacking it about again?

Post by **cowsmanaut** » Fri Jan 16, 2004 8:10 am

no.. PHP was turned off and the bloody people that run this thing had come to the conclusion that it was the site being extra active that cause the extra processes to occur. Something to do with PHP.. an so they had diabled the site entirely (banned) then when we got it up again and it seems like they turned off PHP to.. "solve" the issues? I'm not sure if that's why it was off .. but as good a guess as any..

I'm highly inclined to find some other host. well main host anyway.. the person holding the main domain (www.cgfiles.com) has nothing to do with the outages.. it's MChosts or what have you.. He's switched some of his sub sites over to a new server.. so if we were to move that's where we'd end up.

I was warned that it would start to trickle down to us.. grrr..

moo

Post by **Gambit37** » Fri Jan 16, 2004 12:40 pm

Seems higly dubious that switching off PHP would fix anything -- and all would do is outrage any other users who have accounts on the same server that also use PHP. A very odd conclusion...

I'm also replying to your email here Cow. If you' can handle the transfer of the domain name and suchlike to a new server, I am more than happy to move all the content and the forums to wherever they end up.

Just as an aside, although it may only take ½ hour to do the transfer, it usually takes a few dyas for the DNS info to propagate around the web.

Post by **cowsmanaut** » Fri Jan 16, 2004 5:33 pm

actually that is what I was talking about.. the DNS of the others took about half an hour for at least the north american users to see the website again in his previous attempts. I'm not sure about over to the UK or czech republic or even Japan.. so you could be right it could be a day for it to reach that far.

oh and the comment about PHP shutting down as a solution.. by that I meant a solution to their multiple process "Violations". Well.. if we just turn this off they can't do that anymore..

moo