First thing's first. On behalf of the staff here at Neocodex, we apologize for the 48 hour downtime you experienced. This news post will hopefully explain the whole situation to you.
Circumstances of the Downtime
The Neocodex database had to be forcibly disabled by our host because activity on it was too much and it was slowing down the rest of the clients. The strain on the server arose from two things: a manual backup being made while the board remained open and people were browsing it. What manual backups tend to do is lock the database so pending requests for data have to wait until the backups is complete. These 'pending requests' eventually stack up to a level that causes extreme server load and causes the site to lag.
Every time a user views a page on the board, a session entry is either created or updated in our database. While the backup was running, these session entries were trying to get themselves in the database but were unable to because the database was in use. This caused them to stack up and cause the shutdown we experienced.
Why a Manual Backup Was Taking Place
At around 11:00 PM MST on the 17th, the staff here received information that a possible attack may take place (from who you can probably take a wild guess). The user was apparently waiting until I was logged off the board before executing whatever "attack" they were planning. I received word of this and immediately went to make board backups (to the current time so we weren't stuck with our daily backups).
The server load climbed and next thing I know, our host's abuse department contacts me with a friendly letter about how our database got disabled. My first impression of this was that the attack was executed successfully, but we later found out through investigation that the method of attack that they claimed to use (specifically, an application called SRAPE) was unlikely to have caused the SQL queries to back up. Additionally, the person who was involved in the attack threat defended their innocence after the site crashed giving staff all of their IP and ISP information in case an investigation needed to be made. I came to the conclusion that it was the preparation for the attack that brought down the site, and not the attack (if one did take place).
Board Changes:
- Registrations closed due to the results of referendum being obvious. Invitation system will be installed when I figure it out.
- Server load limitations lowered from 15 to 4. This will cause a message similar to: "Sorry, the server is currently busy at the moment." to appear more often therefore controlling activity spikes much sooner. It will appear when the server is currently doing an operation, so that when session entries or other queries are made they will halt until the operation is finished.
- Posts restructured and optimized: Since the 'posts' section of the database is huge, it has been restructured to save space and conserve memory when posts are looked up. As well, the database has been optimized so that gaps left by deleted posts are filled in with data (sorta like defragmentation of a computer).
While I was waiting for a reply from the host, I came across a site backup done on April 17, 2004. This backup includes approximately 6,700 posts that we thought we had lost forever. These posts were made at around the time period that Neocodex was in conflict with Digibliss (if any old members remember this time period). Personally, I am ecstatic that these posts were found because it was time period that I was promoted to both Moderator and Administrator and for two years I've been unable to find the news posts actually announcing my promotions. They are now found, along with the other posts. These posts will be restored at a later date once the data can be upgraded from IPB 1.3 to 2.1 (so it is compatible).
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As a final message, welcome back to Neocodex!
