Why does the board go down every weekend?

[Yachirobi]

Seriously, why is the site inaccessible every Sunday? Today was better than most weekends because sometimes the board is out Sunday and Saturday! Is this just for updates or is it a bandwith thing?

[BigMuscle12]

The site runs on an SQL database, which unfortunately appears to be unstable with all the demand it's getting, hopefully Flexodus is running cron jobs! lol..

It could just be the CMS causing a lot of the issues too (vbulletin). Personally i've always stuck with SMF or phpBB, mostly because of the price of this CMS, and errors like this.

This is all conjecture, but yes, i'm sick of the database errors too.

[BuffBoy]

Why doesn't flexodus upgrade to something better? I know it cost money, but I'm sure many members can agree when I say, I would totally be up for donating money to see this site become more stable. Its a site I've been visiting for 5 years now, and its one of my favorite sites, very close to me.

I know it can cost hundreds to upgrade but there's thousands of members on here, I'm sure we could easily raise the money!

[musclekeith2001]

The most online users has been 215. That is not alot.
Posting my annoyance in the site suggestion board my post removed.
Even some information from the sites operators would be appreciated.

[BuffBoy]

Originally Posted by musclekeith2001

The most online users has been 215. That is not alot.
Posting my annoyance in the site suggestion board my post removed.
Even some information from the sites operators would be appreciated.

Keith thats just the amount of users that have been online at one time. MuscleGrowth.org has over 15,000 members. Like I said, I'm pretty sure we can raise money to better this wonderful site.

[Yachirobi]

If it is a matter of money then I'd be happy to donate. Hell, I'd give Flexodus a few bucks just for putting the site up and letting us use it for free!

[rextorres]

This is because this forum is based on vbulletin, which is pure crap. I paid $195 for a vbulletin license a year ago, and I have had nothing but problems with the stupid thing, not to mention the enormous amount of spam I had to put up with on my forum as well. Then, when I patched the forum following an email I got from them, it crashed. I contacted their support, and I got NO support at all. What a waste of money that was. I'm NOT surprised this forum is suffering from these problems, which include:
-the site is down every weekend.
-often, I get a blank page after clicking on a link.
-I often get "the server is too busy. please try again later" error message when I click on a link on this forum.
I think the MySQL database is alright, the forum is just worthless.
My two cents' worth...

[ydt81]

Yeah I'm with Buffboy- been on this site for quite some years now; to be honest I've always believed that it was pretty much the best forum of it's kind on the web, the most complete community you'll ever find on this topic. But it seems in the past year that certain errors are coming up that I've never really seen here before...
Hoping things will get better

[hipy]

Note that last downtime was just a lack of paying in time before the domain would expire. This has nothing to do with an unstable database. Just pure lack of paying in time....

[Excelsior]

Speaking from the perspective of a web dev/admin myself, all I have to say is this:

vBulletin is a naughty NAUGHTY little piece of software (imagine that with a king julian voice)

In all seriousness though, I do have a server of my own that has a not inconsiderable amount of space and database ability at it's disposal. If Flexodus wanted some of it, i'd be more than happy to donate whatever resources this site needed.

NOTE: Previous statements watered down for the less technologically literate users. No offense intended.

[hipy]

As head manager of a web hosting company i also have the necessary experience, and i would recommend SMF. Working fine, and good supported. You don't need a new web host for it. You only need to find out a way to convert the database

[fleXodus]

Originally Posted by musclekeith2001

Posting my annoyance in the site suggestion board my post removed.

It would have been better received if you hadn't issued it as an ultimatum.

Originally Posted by rextorres

This is because this forum is based on vbulletin, which is pure crap... I think the MySQL database is alright, the forum is just worthless.

Neither myself or anyone else is forcing you to use this "worthless, crap" forum.



For those who expressed their frustrations with a bit less venom: Thank you!

This has been a long-standing issue with the vBulletin "session" table becoming full and thus rendering vBulletin inaccessible. The session table would become full about once as week. The only way to resolve the issue was for me to log into the phpMyAdmin interface to empty the "session" table manually. Now, normally vBulletin has automated tasks called cronjobs that are normally intended to clean-up these temporary tables, as well as perform other maintenance tasks.

When I'd initially tried to investigate the problem I was told to ensure that the specific code that executed these cronjobs were contained in the template footer, since its absence normally prevented these scripts from running. However, the footer element of our template is actually unmodified from the stock vBulletin template, so I did confirm that this was not the issue and was a bit stumped. Viewing the Scheduled Task Manager in the control panel showed that all automated maintenance tasks, including daily and hourly table cleanup were scheduled to run normally.

However, I now discovered that errors are not even shown on that Task Manager page if tasks don't run successfully. So I manually executed each script and was finally presented with an error. I discovered that a number of the clean-up tasks were referencing pages with a .php3 extension instead of a .php extension, causing "file not found" errors, preventing the script from running at all. None of our page sites use the .php3 extension (just .php), so I haven't a clue as to why vBulletin is referencing pages with this extension.

I changed the extension, re-ran the script manually and got a confirmation that it completed successfully.

I opened up the "session" table in mySQL and have confirmed that expired session table entries are being removed from the sessions table as the clean-up script is intended to do.

This long-standing issue should now be fixed, but I'm sure we'll all know for sure in about a week! *fingers crossed*

Thank you to (just about) everyone for their immense patience during all this.

[musclekeith2001]

Thanks for explaining it all Flexodus and apologies for my abrupt comments. I enjoy visiting this site and appreciate the work you put into it. The frustration of the site being down just got the better of me.

I think rextorres is saying vBulletin is crap software not the site itself or its content.

Anywho, thanks again and I hope the issue is resolved. I'll be more patient in the future.

[Galad]

Thanks flexodus. Your hard work is much appreciated!

[Mad Dog]

Wow, much obliged! :3

[rosco]

Thanks so much - few of us understand the immense amount of time and effort required to run a great site like this. I really appreciate it - I hope all the other do too. Please keep up the good work. Again thanks 'n regards

[fleXodus]

Hey all,

I've been checking the size of the "sessions" database table throughout the evening and it looks like the maintenance script is working as it's supposed to and keeping the table from becoming full (and locking up the site). So at this point I'm confident in finally declaring this long-standing problem resolved!

[Ragetiger]

I am glad the site is up and running. I was trying to view it back on the 13th and saw that godaddy ad... scared the crap out of me "pending renewal or deletion"

I would miss this place if it was gone.

[Yachirobi]

Two weekends so far and no site crashes. Thanks for fixing things, Flexodus!