Lately? Right this second.

Well, that's something.

Self-explanatory

every single day since May 31st? i hope he's getting refunded for the downtime.

Most of them seem to be very short outages (~20mins) so I'm guessing that they're reboots. Still, 7 reboots today (so far) shows that something is screwed.

I'm glad to see this. I know Matt is taking the whole thing seriously, but it's good to see him acknowledge it, even if obliquely. Somehow especially if obliquely.

They (and Matt) make that sound like it's a big deal. It's generous of those guys, but the tech doesn't seem very impressive. For example, I'd monitor from two distant locations, both physically and virtually, to form a triangle with the monitored site.

well, of course you would.

Wow, I knew there were some big problems as of late, but that log is frightening. Things were fine and then somewhere around the end of April they fell apart, and then somewhere around the end of May all Hell broke loose.

huh. why haven't we seen this before? not that it would matter, but you think it would have come up.

the uptime monitor, that is, not the article.

Quoted from the linked article: " I’ve got a bullet-proof uptime monitor checking it every few minutes to see if it’s online."

I was sure this was going to be followed by "they're called the Metafilter Membership, and they email me (or post to any number of satelite webistes) every time the server goes down for more than a few seconds"....

I ping the websites of my stalkees every 4 seconds.

Anastasiav, you need to talk to your hosting co. I'm losing like .4% of my pings.

"I’ve got a bullet-proof uptime monitor checking the bullet-riddled, artillery-blasted heap of nuclear slag i call my site every few minutes to make sure it’s offline."

I'm convinced Schrödinger's cat lives in the mefi server. Or uses it as a litterbox. Or something.

^Best explanation ever.

This is a cheap way to see if the host box is available (which is important) but so what? It gives no view into any other reason for the site to be down. What if it’s network latency or outage? What if you ISP is falling? What if you are generating unneeded DNS queries and bogging down the whole network segment? Poor DB schema, poor queries, weak middleware, memory leaks, all cause outages. How about something that tells you why queries fall and Jrun runs for its life. It’s an OK tool but does not really do much.

again

i'm actually about equal parts stunned and amused that matt posted that.

i like the multitaskiness of it

I like the duality of it.

that was always the nifty thing about the old cia
multitasking

the new cia is multithreaded.

i love having old daily shows be my main news source, but is this newt for prez thing for real?

But with an either/or dichotomy can the centre hold? Wither mefi?

*smashes your top hat
pulls your cravat*

I’m shocked and appalled.
And a little intrigued.

do tell

Erm, so if this thing checks for the existence of a text file but it won't check if the application's up or down. That's right isn't it? Or is the server unable to serve files when JRun goes tits-up?

I would imagine that the server could still serve text files even when JRun is down: Apache is still running. These are just server outages - JRun crashes are a whole 'nother layer of fuckups on top of this.

Only one way to find out though, and we'll no doubt be able to do it soon...

My irony meter crashed. Jrun strikes again.

Too much!

Metachat: when JRun goes tits-up.

"I would imagine that the server could still serve text files even when JRun is down"

I'm under the impression that all the logged-in pages are dynamically generated, at least. I think the front page for non-logged in members is generic and cached where APache can just serve it. Maybe not.

My preference about this kind of thing, you might even call it an obsession, is that as much content as possible, including most of what seems to the end user to be dynamically generated, be cached at the webserver and not require any (or require only minimal) processing by the application layer or, especially, the database. The company I worked for whose software does high-end, enterprise level CMS and application server stuff had this design as part of its architecture from the very beginning. But even if this isn't a central strategy built into the software, it can still be a strategy the site designer can pursue as much as possible. I have the strong impression that Matt has only minimally, and after the fact, optimized metafilter in this way. Thus, mefi is extremely vulnerable to any of the layers failing. And they do, often. But it's telling that it's the application layer that fails most often, the infamous jrun error. That's Cold Fusion's fault. I simply don't believe that Cold Fusion is inherently robust for very high-traffic applications. But my bias towards high-end, enterprise class software that runs into five, six, or seven figures, would of course lead me to assert so.

I'm under the impression that all the logged-in pages are dynamically generated, at least.

Sure. But my question was, does a text file (this one) get served via JRun? The reason I ask is because I believe it doesn't, in which case it's a pretty lousy test of whether the server's opperational or not.

I should read up more about caching - the little I've read recently has been in reference to MediaWiki, but my needs are only for a small departmental intranet so I've not been tempted to read further.

"But my question was, does a text file (this one) get served via JRun?"

God, I hope not. Surely not. But maybe.