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503 errors: April 26 2013

Posted: 26 Apr 2013, 18:29
by Ron2K
Hi,

Some of you may have received 503 errors while browsing the board earlier today (specifically, at around 17:15-17:30 UTC+2).

Database optimisation was being performed at around this time -- this is performed periodically to keep the board's performance at acceptable levels. Typically, this takes less than a minute to execute without any significant impact to the board's users (typically, the only noticeable effect is slightly slower response time); for this reason, it was not announced. However, in this case, database optimisation failed to complete correctly (the web database administration tool ran into a newly-implemented server script limit that I had no prior knowledge about, and terminated abnormally), which appeared to lock several database tables until I was able to ssh in and fix things from there.

The database has now been successfully corrected and optimised, and all forum operations appear nominal. At no point was the integrity of any data contained within the forum database compromised.

Apologies for any inconvenience that this may have caused.