Adventures in SQL
by Eric March on January 18, 2009 at 11:09 pm
Well, that was fun. And by “fun” I mean “kill me now.”
Some of you may have noticed the downtime and the lovely “This account has been disabled” message when you tried to access TouchPodium, Frapstr or WebKit. Turns out that a couple of databases had become a little screwed up and there were all kinds of queries left unclosed, which was hogging CPU time and screwing bloody well everything up. It was causing massively slow queries which was chewing through CPU time like nobody’s business. Apparently, SQL databases are prone to do that over time so every now and then I’ll have to monitor our databases and repair them as necessary. Nevertheless, our host didn’t like all this CPU hogging business and put the entire account on suspension.
So I spent a good hour and a half on the phone with them getting everything straightened out — repairing the databases, primarily, but also they weren’t going to reenable our account until all version of WordPress we were running were upgraded to the latest version. Oddly, the fact that our account was suspended was actually causing the upgrade not to work, so they reenabled our account so I could go ahead and upgrade — which I am currently in the process of doing. And all of this is going on right in the middle of my own computer upgrade, which has unfortunately necessesitated my installing a fresh copy of Windows from scratch because I was unable to effect a repair install to recover my old installation. I’ve barely got Windows 7 set up, so I’m doing all of this barebones in Internet Explorer (yecch!).
Anyway, Touch Podium is now running the latest WordPress, and I am about to upgrade Frapstr. (Flog is okay because it’s already running 2.7.) But if you were wondering what the hell was going on with the site, now you know. We should be safe now; the account suspensions should cease and the databases are all fine.
We now return to your original blog already in progress.
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Posted in Announcements
January 18th, 2009 at 11:46 pm
Turns out there’s some good behind this after all: WordPress is up to date now!
Couldn’t stand writing in the old WordPress – I’ve adjusted to the new one writing at other places.
January 19th, 2009 at 12:05 am
Yeah. The primary reason we never upgraded was because upgrading was a huge pain in the ass. Fortunately our host has the latest versions of Fantastico and SimpleScripts, and SimpleScripts can convert WordPress installations from Fantastico, which means we get access to the latest versions of WordPress with one-button upgradability. I really prefer the new WordPress too, and this has been bugging me for ages.
Fortunately we’re all up to date now across all blogs.
Oh, welcome aboard, by the way! I never got a chance to say that before.
January 19th, 2009 at 12:29 am
Thanks Eric!