I figured if we can talk about BF being down then SA is fair game as well. I’m sure there are other SAers here.
SA forums have been down well over 24 hours now and still no ETA. Last update from Lowtax on Twitter was that the DBA from there hosting provider “wrestling” with their “convoluted database infrastructure”. What on earth goes on over there that it could be down so long with no ETA in sight? This is after search and archives were down for a long ass time (I want to say at least 2 weeks). How could some measly forums be so difficult to administer?
To be fair to SA, they are one of the largest independent forums on the internet, plus I think they’re one of the most heavily monitored by law enforcement.
Forum software doesn’t scale well to high loads. You need to do all kinds of crazy caching to make them work, which requires layers upon layers of hacks. The SA forums are heavily customized.
(Note these things are not why Qt3 is slow. We don’t get a ton of traffic, our host just sucks.)
In this case, since they said it was a DB issue, my guess is they broke a bunch of slaves or multimasters.
SA was doing high traffic stuff with a bunch of custom hacks for a very long time now. Assuming all that cruft just built up by single programmers over 15-odd years, I can certainly believe that it’s one gigantic mess that needs to be nuked from orbit. I’d be more surprised if it wasn’t.
Closer to 48 hours - they tanked sometime Sunday evening (and were having outages last week as well). And I think you’re also underestimating how long the search and archives were down but I can’t swear to it.
I’d just gotten into a couple of play by post RPGs. :(
A long downtime like this is rather suspicious since at some point you’d just give up and say fine, we’ll lose a day or so of posts, just restore it from backup. At which point somebody might have said “Um, backups?”…
Edit: And now, according to his twitter, they’re only just now starting the restore process.
A site where people write comedy articles making fun of other parts of the internet and terrible games, movies, etc.
For some reason also one of the biggest, most active forum communities on the internet on practically any topic you could name, with aggressively enforced rules, one time fees for membership and enabling certain high-load features (also something you stand to lose if you behave badly) and a surprisingly high level of discourse outside of the specially corralled “bad posting” subforums. Keeping up with even the bigger subforums would be nearly impossible.
Also, as vyshka says, home of probably the largest band of online gaming griefers in the universe.
Wow…its been years since I visited Something Awful. I do miss Photoshop Fridays. And the time Lowtax let all the Photoshop submitters know that some of their works found their way onto Ebaumsworld. Furious Internet Hilarity!
I have a better answer than stusser (at least I think is better, maybe I am wrong)
4chan is a bulletin board
SA is a forum.
4channers seems anarchist, but the freedom they provide allow any political opinion.
SA forums seems to be more libertarian and elitist.
but all these maybe are just accidental, and not really representative of the real people behind, …only representative of the hivemind the community has produced.
