Sorry for the down
time on our Electric Scotland Community. We now expect to be back up
on Sunday at some point.
We've been unhappy with the performance of the community in that it
was slowing down and taking far too long to post messages. We
believe there is an underlying problem with MySQL and the server
configuration and so we felt simply restoring the system was in this
case not an option.
The issue came to a head when trying to install the Facebook app
where we received an incorrect install pack. The installation thus
caused the problems and as it was a complex install needing also to
connect to our secure server it needed a special script to be run to
uninstall the system. It was all this that caused the problem that
resulted in us going down.
We have been running some serious diagnostics on the server and it
would appear this is taking around 2 full days to complete. During
this work we have discovered numerous problems which the program is
fixing as it runs through the checks.
Right now we've completed a full scan of the system which took
around 16 hours. We've run a registry check which also took several
hours and again fixed a number of issues. We're now on the final
scan through which at time of writing is going to take another 5
hours. As I'm writing this at 12 noon on Saturday you can see it
won't complete until around 5pm.
Once that is complete we'll reboot the server to ensure all is
working and then we'll be doing a clean manual install of the latest
version of MySQL which will take around 3 hours. Once that has
completed we'll do another reboot and hopefully when it comes up
we'll have no error messages. Note also that it is currently taking
some 35 minutes to completely bring the server back up after a
reboot when it should take at worst 5 minutes.
All our databases are intact so no information should be lost. The
final task will then be to install the Facebook app and other social
networking links.
When trying to identify the problem with MySQL we received an email
from the author of the
CCleaner
product who kindly sent us a copy of his program. We were told that
an issue with MySQL is that it can have cross linked files which
impares its performance. The product works with WIndows 2008 servers
but also runs with Windows for your personal PC. Steve is very
impressed with this program and it certainly seems to be doing a
great job. I intend to run it on my own PC so it's possibly worth
getting a copy for your own PC as it is a free product.
Of course to get to this stage we've done a lot of other work to try
and fix the problems which is why it has taken so long to resolve
this issue.
So at the end of the day this might be a blessing in disguise as we
obviously had issues with the underlying software and so hopefully
this will nwo give us a much more robust system.
Once again we're sorry for the downtime and hopefully by Sunday
we'll be back up and running.
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