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felix
2007-02-08, 07:53
Wasn't able to access AS up till just now (would just stall).
I mamaged to access it now however that was after I got a database error screen and then refreshed.

Changes?! :)
xris
2007-02-08, 08:04
Looking at the recent posts, it seems the forum was down for about 11 hours. It came back up about 90 minutes ago. Don't know what the problem was.
SeijiSensei
2007-02-08, 08:10
Looked like a database crash from here. No matter how many front-end servers there are, the database represents a single point of failure.
Kyuusai
2007-02-08, 10:59
Looked like a database crash from here. No matter how many front-end servers there are, the database represents a single point of failure.

Depends on your database setup. :D

But yes, it did seem to be a database problem. I don't expect for AS to pour enough cash into its setup to use a distributed, redundant database system, and I'm sure we all lived through those 11 hours without it. :)
SeijiSensei
2007-02-09, 08:58
I know there can be db systems with replication, but I don't think you can have a redundant implementation of MySQL yet. It's not my free database of choice (I've used PostgreSQL for about a decade now.), so I could be wrong. My understanding is that things like replication are what really differentiate PostgreSQL/MySQL from systems like Oracle. Maybe Larry Ellison is a secret anime fan....
Jinto
2007-02-09, 11:15
A distributed database induces some performance overhead, since any changes to the databases must be decided in a majority vote among involved database, usually 3 phase commits are used to guarantee certain criterias such transactions require. Since this technology is not quite easy to implement on the whole SQL language instruction set, only the big ones have it (oracle, db2...)
GHDpro
2007-02-09, 16:57
Database errors occur in a while. It's not as bad as long as no data is lost. The main reason the forum was down was probably because Mb81 didn't notice it earlier (presuming the problem was easy to fix) and he is (as far as I know) the only person who controls his servers.

If there were multiple admins in different timezones then problems like this could be noticed and fixed sooner. Then again, it's been ages since the last database error, so it's no major disaster if things like this happen occasionally, IMHO.