Looks like the site is having database issues at the moment. Might have to restore from the last backup, which was yesterday. I’ll investiage shortly when I’ve got the tools for the job. It might just need a repair, it might need more.

Or I might just stick it on the “Can’t be arsed” pile.

Edit: From what I can gather, the server restarted about 6 hours ago and the stats table was goosed since then. The repair on the database took longer than expected, mainly due to the size of this stats table, but it appears to have survived with only a tiny amount of data being written off, certainly not enough to warrant restoring from a backup.

The site lives to fight another day! I bet you can’t wait for my next installation of shit music and lamp posts.

Gah! For those who were silly enough to a) be awake and b) sad enough to access this site between between 3AM and 7:30AM, you’ll have found that you received an error message along the lines of “Error establishing a database connection”. This was because the database ‘thing’ decided to pop its clogs and stop responding.

I reported the issue on the webhost’s support forum, but unfortunately, nothing happened for approximately 4 hours, and the site was left in a state of limbo, until someone from 34SP spotted the problem and rebooted the server…

Thankfully, this type of thing doesn’t happen too often, and it’s the first downtime I’ve noticed since my switch to the new server a few months ago, and to be fair to the hosts, this type of downtime should have been brought to their attention, and they’re looking into why it didn’t occur.

Sadly, this website feckup also occured with yet more flickr downtime, and as one of my forum haunts ObscureInternet is hosted on the same server as this site, it also suffered the same downtime as I did, which means that my entire nightshift was wasted actually doing work. Oh, OK, I only posted that last sentence to see if the “facebook grass” has spread onto personal websites yet!

Now, if you don’t mind me, I’ve got some Roger Whittaker to listen to.

Just in case something goes wrong, I’m just posting to state that I’m going to be working on the site for the next couple of hours. I’ve noticed that it’s running a little sluggish in places, so the site’s databases are probably in need of a spring clean, especially the stats table. I’d forgotten to clear it for a couple of months, so it was stupidly big in size. I dropped all of February’s information from it, and it seems to be running a little better. I could probably do with losing the March info too. That should speed it up even more.

I suppose there could be worse ways of spending a Saturday Morning.