It is a professional thing to do: When a website experiences downtime, the administrator should explain to the users what happened.
In this case, we do not know what really happened, but we shall try and explain what we know:
At around 12:20PM (PST) this afternoon (Friday, October 30, 2009) our website became inaccessible. Events went down as listed:
First, the Internet cut out due to a failing router (still in the works of being replaced). This was the initial problem that made the site inaccessible.
Second, all services provided by MySQL ceased proper function — MySQL reported on the physical server’s main terminal that MySQL ran out of memory. This caused MySQL to quit.
Third, unexpectedly, the server “froze up” completely. MySQL may have been doing some sort of redundant processing resulting in the server running out of memory, but this is only speculation.
Server functions resumed around 4:30PM the same afternoon, with approximately 4 hours 10 minutes of downtime.
Future changes to prevent such issues:
Router replacement. This was not entirely a programming issue.
Other changes:
Forum removed.
