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Mon 21st May 2012 1:48pm
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prince.org staff blog

news from the folks who run prince.org

Weekly updates for 2010-08-08

August 8th, 2010

Weekly updates for 2010-08-01

August 1st, 2010

Weekly updates for 2010-07-25

July 25th, 2010

Weekly updates for 2010-07-18

July 18th, 2010

Weekly updates for 2010-07-11

July 11th, 2010

Weekly updates for 2010-07-04

July 4th, 2010

If the elevator stops, punch a higher floor… oops, server crash!

June 28th, 2010

OK, so the BET awards last night caused a pretty significant influx of additional traffic to prince.org. Once we got 3.5x the usual traffic, things started to go downhill quickly. We ran out of memory, and then out of CPU. It’s not supposed to happen; we should be able to handle reasonable spikes in usage, but then again, we ain’t runnin’ Google here :)

Here’s what it looked like from a “load” perspective on our Linux server:

During normal days, we stay under 1.0, which means essentially, nothing the server is asked to do, waits… everything is serviced as fast as it is requested. Even a load of 2 or 3 can be manageable, but when our web traffic drives us this hard this quickly, we exhaust resources and go into a ‘death spiral’. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens when Prince is the center of major media attention (the previous time was the Super Bowl). So, even though it can be inconvenient, and I do apologize… I kind of wish there was a reason for Prince to make the site crash more :)

Weekly updates for 2010-06-27

June 27th, 2010

Weekly updates for 2010-06-20

June 20th, 2010

Weekly updates for 2010-06-13

June 13th, 2010