Server randomly ceases to load for minutes at a time.

[The Man]

Only seems to happen around this time of night. Just thought you should know.

[Samuraid]

Hmm. Yeah, I've seen it do that at certain times during the day.

Either the log processing program is to blame, or MySQL is getting held up on a table lock.

I'll look into it right now.

[Del Murder]

Sometimes this happens at the end of the month.

[Yamaneko]

It happens sporadically actually.

[Samuraid]

Yeah, most times I see it occur randomly throughout the day, and only for about 30 seconds. During that time, a bunch of connections start to stack up, on EoFF only. (other sites on the server are mostly unaffected)

I think it's due to a sluggish MySQL update that locks a forum database table and causes all the select queries on that table to block until the update completes. It's also possible that a cron job is optimizing the the database, which locks entire tables down during the optimize process.

If anyone notices the forums freezing, please note the exact time of day (and your timezone) and send me a PM. That would help immensly. :)

[The Man]

well, I made this thread like thirty seconds after the most recent time it happened. If it happens again I'll let you know.

[Yamaneko]

Sometimes I get locked out of specific parts of the DB. I can access the index, but not threadbit or any thread for that matter. I always thought it was a cron job doing its job.

[Samuraid]

Well, no cron jobs should be running optimize queries. If they are, they shall be disabled.

[eestlinc]

we have this problem at work when we do automated data loads at 3am.

[rubah]

I was making a post yesterday when it locked up on me. But I was browsing another forums page in another tab and it loaded fine. 12:30 AM gmt -6 was when it freed back up and the thing got posted.

[-N-]

I assume there's just some resource consuming maintenance process that occurs around that time. It sometimes locks up on me too, but I pet it and sing softly to it and then it works again.

It's a thankless job, really.

[Samuraid]

Ok, I reorganized the server statistics software a little bit so performance may improve.