No problems here (actually, often when I see "Mefi is down" posted to this site I can get in with no problems. Is that weird?

I just updated my profile over there. I think I might have crashed the server.

MeFi is teh gehy

everytime you get a server error, a website gets it's wings

"Hey, gang! Let's put on a show!"
*grabs lard for Alfalfa's hair*

ok, if mudpuppie gets to vent about "the blogging", i get to give the not so high sign to vibrating "teh"

Hey, why don't you replace these down/up posts with an indicator featured prominately that any logged-in user can toggle? Along with a link to a permanent continuing thread that people can post detailed info on status, if they like?

I am not a blogger, but I am taking a Web Design & HTML class this Summer and plan on presenting Metafilter as a case study so the whole class can work on fixing whatever the problem is with the server crashing every 12 hours.

no up/down posts?
but then who plays the Abbot to your Costello?
Groucho to your Marx?

i'd rather have a "Thunderdome area" where people have scheduled duels and/or pick champions and weapons of choice.

"i challenge thee to battle of rapiers in the category of dendrites!"

rapier wits to the left, factclubs to the right
only one use of the non sequitor allowed per round

ethylene: Lovin' "a website gets it's wings", lovin' it!

I think you should rework the lyrics from Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler's "Ballard of the Green Berets" for MeFi.

*pins silver wings on mexican's chest*

*puts shirt back on*

i'm just trying to cash in on the surplus of wing pins with server error engraved on them

MeFi is teh gehy

MeFi is teh gehry

Hey, why don't you replace these down/up posts with an indicator featured prominately that any logged-in user can toggle? Along with a link to a permanent continuing thread that people can post detailed info on status, if they like?

up/down vote? who are you, george bush?

No, see the whole point of the repeated "MeFi iz goin' down on my jock like yo momma!" posts is so that we can go back and tabulate them later.

It's like netcraft.com, without the science and pretty graphs.

Just thought it'd be a lot more useful for the given purpose, is all. I don't see why it wouldn't work. I bet enough people come to metachat often enough so that a user-controlled toggle would be fairly reliable. You could also check for length of time since the change of state was reported, and report that on the page. If you wanted a bit more accuracy at the expense of precision, then you could only accept a change of state if it's reported consecutively by two different IPs.

Alternatively, you could actually check mefi's status regularly yourself. Maybe checking for significant MetaFilter functionality (meaning something that's not cached) once a minute. If that fails, then just from that connection attempt you can tell if you get jrun, or another server error, or no http connection, or even no connection to the IP at all. And you'd probably want to account for a routing problem from your IP.

...again, because I don't think these threads are that useful. And I've been checking metachat quite regularly.

I'm trying to fall asleep. But if I can't, this sounds interesting enough that I'd like to implement both ideas and might do so at my own site, just as an example.

I don't think these threads are that useful.
The day that MetaChat becomes useful is the day I move into a cave without wifi.

up down ping pong

Why doesn't Matt just set the thing to reboot automatically every 8 hours? Given that it seems to go down at aboutthe same time every day, it's probably a resource issue.

Actually this reminds me of my second year at college. You'd think we could all program by then, but Aris (God bless his handsome Greek soul) still hadn't got the concept of loops. However big he forced the stack to be his program would still crash. It didn't take long to find out why. Not understanding either For... Next, Repeat...Until or While, he'd made every single one of his procedures recursive.

Oh, how we laughed.
/ me finishes boring CS college story.

amberglow: I think yu'll find that MeTa is teh gehry. MeFi is teh buhlye. (or something)

"Why doesn't Matt just set the thing to reboot automatically every 8 hours?"

I've often wondered the same thing. Why doesn't he just have a cronjob (in his case, a service) that checks metafilter functionality and reboots if it fails? That's almost as brute force as your suggestion, and a band-aid, but they'd both do more than is being done now.

Wendell: I've been operating on the assumption that part of the intent of metachat was to be useful in this specific manner. Among other things, but nevertheless.

kmellis - that "downtime indicator" idea came up before but I wasn't too keen. There's no such thing as a wasted thread at metachat.org so there doesn't seem much point.

As for Matt's server woes, I'm really surprised he hasn't found some cheat just to keep things running - like the 8 hour reboot seany suggested. I've often had to keep dodgy servers and services running and it's not that hard to do. Blue screens can be set to auto-reboot, services can be monitored and server reboots initiated if necessary. I just assume that either the server gets totally fucked or he can't see the wood for the trees when it comes to a quick solution. Ho-hum.

or: (And I've been down this road) He doesn't want to do the auto-reboot easy-fix thing because if he does that, he'll forget about the problem, and never get round to fixing it.

Well whatever mefi has is catching, because my gmail is down now. And it's truly annoying, I caught a glimpse of it, and there are two emails I actually want to read. Gah. Matt broke the internet.

and it's down again. gmail works for me, mygoth