After a long fight against the thousands of error 503s that were haunting this place, we are safe to say that we've found the main source of the problem and we can now follow a better tiberian vision envisioned by Kane, from now on.
In the latest weeks, we have moved two hostees to their own accounts (The Dawn of the Tiberium Age and Twisted Insurrection), optimized many scripts and hosted sites, forum software, tweaked many .htaccess files, robots.txt and even reformed the way Google crawls this place.
But the source of the problem was in the way that sites and scripts written by me tried to close the mysql connection, everytime they ran. The problem was... phpBB does create a persistent mysql connection. It doesn't close it. If you ask it to close it, it will try to close it and ignore the error message. The several attempts at once to close a persistent connection that can't be closed does lock the sites resources (in this case, the connection to mysql). In some cases, it could crash the php process that handles the site. In these cases, the evil error 503 appeared. Even if we used the latest phpBB that is under development, this problem would also happen.
Now, the site is much faster and it has not reported any error 503 since the solution was applied. Let's hope it continues like that for a long time.
By the way, for those who read the last news post, Twisted Insurrection has been fully moved to a new account and it is working correctly now. Everything works! Have fun and enjoy this place!
In the latest weeks, we have moved two hostees to their own accounts (The Dawn of the Tiberium Age and Twisted Insurrection), optimized many scripts and hosted sites, forum software, tweaked many .htaccess files, robots.txt and even reformed the way Google crawls this place.
But the source of the problem was in the way that sites and scripts written by me tried to close the mysql connection, everytime they ran. The problem was... phpBB does create a persistent mysql connection. It doesn't close it. If you ask it to close it, it will try to close it and ignore the error message. The several attempts at once to close a persistent connection that can't be closed does lock the sites resources (in this case, the connection to mysql). In some cases, it could crash the php process that handles the site. In these cases, the evil error 503 appeared. Even if we used the latest phpBB that is under development, this problem would also happen.
Now, the site is much faster and it has not reported any error 503 since the solution was applied. Let's hope it continues like that for a long time.
By the way, for those who read the last news post, Twisted Insurrection has been fully moved to a new account and it is working correctly now. Everything works! Have fun and enjoy this place!