The website was down this evening for about 4 hours. Unfortunately, as these things go, I was out to dinner with my wife (Murphy's Law). I have several monitoring services that report to me if the website is unresponsive for more than 5 minutes but I usually don't pay attention if it isn't more than 10-15 minutes (monitors can misfire, server reboots, etc.).
When I got home and did my routine checks my dashboard was a 404 error ('unavailable'). Then I saw a couple of emails asking me about the website. I have not changed anything recently so I called GoDaddy hosting support. After about 25 min the tech answered and started looking. The server was functioning but the website was not, which to them means it is not their problem but ours. He looked around various server logs and metrics and found the Wordpress had maxxed out the PHP memory (I know that doesn't mean anything to you but program memory is where things happen in real-time). If we have no more memory then things stop. So I increased the memory limit and the website immediately responded.
That's pretty obscure - I have not seen that before. It is fixed for now but I still don't know why it happened. That is worrisome. So I will watch the metrics closely over the next several days and do some troubleshooting. I might engage a developer if I can narrow it down.
If the website goes down again you have some idea of what goes on behind the scenes. High pucker factor. Some cursing involved. Lots of nooks and crannies to check for errors and changes, knobs and dials to turn, numerous logs to check. Now I am holding my breath waiting to see if it happens again.
Just thought you ought to know...
Jerry
Jerry
I fly (and ride) to free my mind from the tyranny of petty things. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Quote from Viajero on February 25, 2024, 9:24 pmThe website was down this evening for about 4 hours. Unfortunately, as these things go, I was out to dinner with my wife (Murphy's Law).
Jerry, I think the most interesting part of your post, was telling us that your wife's name is....Murphy's Law.
Two Million Mile Rider...All 7 Continents
Exploring the World in Comfort
Yes it was doing all kind of strange things yesterday
The good news is we're back in action! 🙂
Thanks Jerry, really appreciate all the work you put into making this happen. <insert sincere Thumbs Up! emoji here 😉 >
Hold my keyboard and watch this! 🙃
That's the problem with getting popular. Everyone wants in.
It's strange that it seems to have recovered after the peak and then crashed. I think the tech didn't know what they were talking about. (That's coming from a former but out of date network consultant so grain of salt that one.)
Any word on the upgrades that were in the works?
Other forums related to motorcycle were having issues also at the same time.
@Drew - "Any word on the upgrades that were in the works?"
I'll answer that in a separate post so we don't have 'thread creep' and stay on topic. But generally, it's complicated and I am doing a lot of research and study in multiple areas (new hosting service, forum software, membership management).
Jerry
I fly (and ride) to free my mind from the tyranny of petty things. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Thanks much for what you do Jerry. From my point of view, you do a damn fine job!! Kind of like our farm ground here. We lease it out. We get to sit back and watch someone else do all the work but we reap our share of the profits. Also we have no fuel or equipment costs. We split the rest of the costs and get our share of the crop. Not sure that's the case here, we just watch you do the work! lol...
