notes on a disrupted Saturday morning Dear friends,
MFO was taken off-line by our hosting company for a several hours on Saturday morning. They concluded that we'd generated extraordinary server load over the past couple days. We got a warning note on 7:45 a.m., suggesting that we review our data demands and consider a dedicated server. Ninety minutes later we were taken offline because we threatened the stability of the server which housed us. Chip, later joined by James, one of her IT staff colleagues, and Accipiter, worked to resolve the challenge and reason with the server folks. By early afternoon we were back online.
The question of server load is a bit tough for us to analyze because it's not necessarily related to the traffic we draw or the number of pages you view. One bad bit of computer code might generate a huge demand on a server by asking it to endlessly repeat the same action (think about Abbott and Costello's old "who's on first" routine). Chip and Accipiter reviewed our database files and disabled a number of plug-ins, especially those related to the board software. We've requested heightened monitoring from our hosting company - both so that we could create a baseline for normal server demand but also as an early warning system for demand spikes. We haven't yet heard back from them on whether they'll cooperate.
What's next? Chip and James, her colleague, have signed us up for a Cloud Flare account - a cloud-based service which has the prospect of noticeably improving our speed though not directly addressing the problem of downtime, have created a backup copy of MFO and will soon be able to test other server options. Together those actions create the possibility for us to migrate to a dedicated and better-monitored server. It will take some time and will incur some additional operating expense, but we think both are well worth it if the result is a more stable site that's always available to you.
So, regrets for any inconvenience and thanks to Chip, James and Accipiter for making a massive effort on no notice, on a day they'd normally have off.
As ever,
David
a (down) day in the life of the market Sorry, guys. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to embed an html table. That was the source of the Alcatraz ethos in the draft posting. If only Charles (or chip or Accipiter) were here, they'd make it all better!
David
Sign-In Problem Reply to
@VirtueRunsDeep: Well, on my old Mac, it's right there under "Firefox" in the top main menu bar, the very first menu item.
Actually, the complete path would be Firefox/Preferences/Privacy/Show Cookies. "Preferences" brings up another smaller window, and "Privacy" is one of the menu items within that smaller window.
I notice that
Accipiter just posted additional info, I'm guessing probably for Windows, so try whatever one works for you. I sure hope this helps!
Regards-
Thumbnails don't work Reply to
@Accipiter: :D i see my ugly mug now. Thanks. My daughter made that "avatar" of me on some website when she was just 5. So I take it very personally.
Thumbnails don't work Reply to
@Accipiter: Hmmm...right here right now I'm still seeing my entire bust. Snipping and pasting for your reference...

Sign-In Problem Reply to
@Accipiter: Went to IE control panel and typed in www.mutualfundobserver.com to enable session cookie to always allow.
Regards,
Ted