The Town of Odyssey

Same here..

I still have not been receiving notification emails from here.

Jehoshaphat wrote:I still have not been receiving notification emails from here.

Same. I've kinda just given up that I ever will. heh. Since it's been this way for months.

Jehoshaphat wrote:I still have not been receiving notification emails from here.

In what way are you not receiving email notifications? Like, how would you normally?

Normally whenever someone posts in a topic I had either posted in or marked as watched, I would receive an email telling me that there was a new post. For the past several months these emails have not come.

Hmm, for the first one, check your settings? For the second one, how are you marking it as watched?

I have already checked my settings multiple times. When I say watch I mean subscribed, which there is a little option in the bottom left corner to subscribe to topics.

Hmm.. I don't know, I'm getting email notifications.

I'm still getting email notifications as well.

Is anyone else still intermittently experiencing the ToO refusing to connect?

SirWhit wrote:I'm still getting email notifications as well.

Is anyone else still intermittently experiencing the ToO refusing to connect?

It would not connect for me when I tried early this morning on both Safari and Firefox. Also happened this afternoon right after I logged off after posting.

After suspecting this from general observation over the past several days I just confirmed that a timeout occurs immediately after someone has made a new post in a thread. If you attempt to load the site too soon after that it will fail. Refreshing after the error will make it work again. (So this is likely a separate issue from the sporadic downtime we've been witnessing of late as that case lasts for a more extended time.) This does not happen every time a post is made, but every time it happens a post has been made. So that is the cause, but it doesn't always cause it.

Has anyone other than me and Kaida been experiencing a very unstable ToO? For instance, lately the ToO just refuses to load and will go out for a minute or two then come back, and over the past few days it's been going out for longer intervals, like today and the other day, it was out for a few hours. This afternoon I think it was out for at least 3 hours, maybe four.

At any rate, I messaged Shadow and he said:

Shadowpaw wrote:I've increased the ram by about 60%. Let me know how it runs!

So, I ask you guys keep this thread updated on your user experience.

I was just going to post about this myself as it happened again today; it is not just you. As you say it's not simply sporadic load fails, it's extended downtime, but the site comes through randomly for a flicker now and then. What is odd though is investigation indicates this isn't a problem with the site itself.

The server is still pingable and reachable by traceroute while it doesn't load in browsers; it seems something is interfering with html access only. Flooding or misconfiguration on port 80 perhaps? I don't know why that would just suddenly start happening though. Regardless the issue appears to be on the Dreamhost end as far as I can tell, at least based on what I've observed so far.

That means unfortunately more ram won't solve the problem, if that is the case; but this diagnosis isn't definite so that's as good a thing to try right now as anything. We'll see if that seems to stabilize things.

bookworm wrote:Regardless the issue appears to be on the Dreamhost end as far as I can tell, at least based on what I've observed so far.

Seriously, we need to trash Dreamhost. It seems all we get is grief from them.

The ToO has been very flaky and fragile for quite some time now. I think it's about time we get something more stable.

If this is indeed a host problem. Let's give the new memory a chance; the more I think about it that could have been part of the problem after all. I still don't know why it would have become a problem suddenly out of the blue like this, but it's at least not going to hurt.

Can you please direct Shadowpaw to that last post in the meantime to be sure he's aware of the fact that during these outings the server is not actually down, or indeed unreachable entirely, it's just the html port that isn't working. That's important to know.

Edit:

If he can't find an issue with connecting to the port, my best guess based on the behavior would be that the problem is DNS related. That would mean nothing is actually broken, there's just something confusing our traffic routes right now from finding the port to even try connecting. That would explain why we can still get in at random flickers before it goes dead again, some connections find their way through.

As Snubs noted, please keep me updated how things run with the upgraded RAM.

As for why that would fix the issue, I can't guarantee it will. However, aiohq.com, aiowiki.com, and thetoo.com are all hosted on the same server (aiosoda.com is on a separate server). When thetoo.com goes down, aiowiki.com also goes down though aiohq.com often remains operational and if I'm notified by someone that the sites have gone done, I always see a very high RAM usage indicator on the MYSQL server that hosts the data for both those sites (aiohq.com is not using MYSQL). When the RAM is running at full capacity, the system runs of out memory and doesn't know what to do to process your requests and nothing loads because PHP pages won't render until the MYSQL server sends back a response (which is why you can still ping it, but the page won't load). The server is programmed to reboot automatically when it stops responding for a certain period of time, which is why it "fixes itself" from time to time.

I believe the RAM grows because of something on aiowiki.com, but we've never identified what it is or why it doesn't happen all the time. I've avoided upgrading the RAM for a while, as it's costly to do so and the usage on thetoo.com is much, much lower than it used to be... but we'll see how it works.

If the RAM increase doesn't resolve the issue, it's likely because AIOWIKI is just growing to fill up all the new available RAM as well, putting us back in the same situation. But we'll see. Please post in this thread good/bad experiences since the upgrade and that way I can see if it's worth the money for the RAM increase.

Thanks for your patience and sorry for the troubles!

^AHHHHH! THE ONE AND ONLY SHADOWPAW???

Thank you for everything you do sir!!!

Thanks for the info. I figured you looked to ram because of additional diagnostic indicators you have on your end.

I already suspected the wiki was involved here; you'll recall previous issues we had were caused by it sharing the server as well. Something is off with it. Wish we could track down what.

Shadowpaw wrote:If the RAM increase doesn't resolve the issue, it's likely because AIOWIKI is just growing to fill up all the new available RAM as well, putting us back in the same situation. But we'll see. Please post in this thread good/bad experiences since the upgrade and that way I can see if it's worth the money for the RAM increase.

So far things have been working nicely.

I'm curious to know though if it would be cheaper to put the ToO on a separate server than the AIOwiki? It seems for a long time now nearly every time we are having trouble it is connected to AIOwiki. If what you say is true, and it is just the wiki continually growing and taking up more RAM, won't this continue to be an existing problem?

It's cheaper to keep them shared, as increasing RAM is an incremental cost and moving it to it's own separate server would actually force me to pay for twice the number of servers.

I've checked periodically and I haven't had any high data usage and we're averaging about 70% capacity of RAM, which is much lower than the recent average of 95% usage. And the server hasn't triggered a reboot yet either. So it's promising!