As you may have noticed, we've had a couple of ...issues... lately. For this, I apologize. As much as I hated having the machines in my apartment, they seemed so much more stable then. I'm working on fixing downtime stuff, and it's refreshing to have an ISP that's working with me. So kudos (thus far) to voxrox. I'm going to delve, very briefly, into the tech stuff, so feel free to skip this and go mock Zamphir in the other forums, if you don't care about that stuff.
This morning's issue was caused by a routine update to MySQL. After installing a bug-fix release, it spontaneously refused to admit that three tables were there (the series table, and two holding user-options). It appeared that the InnoDB table space was corrupted in such a way that if I tried to drop the corrupted tables, it would tell me that they didn't exist, but if I tried to recreate them, it would tell me that they were already there, and I should drop them first. Somewhat frustrating. Luckily, our nightly database backup runs at 7.30 in the AM, and this occurred around a half hour later, so, I just deleted everything, and then recreated all from scratch. My hope/assumption, is that there was some latent corruption in the InnoDB files that the latest update was more sensitive to. Seeing as how these are the same files, copied from machine to machine, that were running in my apartment, and then on the crappy Interland servers, I wouldn't be surprised if they were somewhat funky.
The other, more usual, issue is with the web server, not the database. For some reason, every once in a while an apache process decides that it really, really needs more CPU time, and that pesky things like "the operating system" shouldn't be allowed to kill it. This is...odd. There's the possibility of flaky RAM in the machine, which will be subbed out sometime in the next day or so, there's also the possibility of library mismatches from an upgraded perl that was not recompiled into a newer mod_perl. There's also the possibility that I'm talking out of my ass, and have no clue what is causing this. Only time will tell.
