Friendly Mockery - Mockingbird Blog
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Sorry about the downtime!

Our server went down for about three and a half hours earlier this morning, which I managed to fix with a reboot after I was made aware of the issue.  After investigating it, it seems like it was just a simple matter of our web server taking up too much memory, which led to the server killing a few processes and eating a bunch of CPU.  This, in turn, caused the site to become inaccessible.  

Enhancing our infrastructure has been one of our major goals as we go towards 1.0.  We've already worked on a lot of enhancements, but much of these have been towards redundancy and protection of user data, as we believe keeping our users' data safe and backed up is our first priority.   We now need to turn our attention to better server monitoring, as today's outage shows.  We've already put in measures to make sure we are notified as soon as our server goes down, no matter what time of day or night it is.  In the coming weeks, we'll be installing more tools to monitor memory and general server usage more intelligently. 

Sorry again for the downtime, but rest assured that we'll be doing our best to make sure this doesn't happen again.

Comments (2)

Feb 24, 2010
Stephane said...
So you have a single point of failure : the unique Web server/proxy. Not good not good !
Feb 24, 2010
@Stephane You're right - part of working on infrastructure stuff before we get out of beta is to either add a failover server or move entirely to AWS.

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