Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.
Welcome to our site! Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.
The database seems to be going down quite a bit recently, if the error message is to be believed. Maybe there's a new server in use which isn't configured to handle the load yet, or which just plain can't deal with the load.
It could be something else too. The other day I could visit the main page (the forum list) just fine, but trying to visit any forum, thread, or post resulted in a database error message.
I'm sure there is still a lot of details to work out from the recent move. Just be patient, maybe start a new project when the site is down, take lots of pictures, and post the results when it comes back up...
I chat on other forums that show thousands of people online at the same time without problems.
But the server for this site runs away whenever there are more than 20 people online. Or the server just goes to sleep for a few hours.
We understand that this site does get a bit of downtime, not quite every weekend, but every now and then. We are however always trying to improve this, recently we upgraded the server to help out (about a month back).
One of the main reasons for downtime is rouge bots that hammer our site. What they do is try and download pages or the entire site for their own purposes (search engine caches, spam databases, content leeches, offline copies, etc) and they do this without consideration to the load that it puts on the server, they use as many connections and download as many pages as fast as possible. Obviously search engines like google, yahoo, msn don’t do this but there are many others out there that do and that is the problem we face on a daily basis.
Another issue is the constant growth this site has experienced in the past. Look at the stats at the bottom of the page and you will see we hit over 200,000 unique visitors in the last month. That’s an incredible amount of electronic hobbyist!!
One of the main reasons for downtime is rouge bots that hammer our site. What they do is try and download pages or the entire site for their own purposes (search engine caches, spam databases, content leeches, offline copies, etc) and they do this without consideration to the load that it puts on the server, they use as many connections and download as many pages as fast as possible. Obviously search engines like google, yahoo, msn don’t do this but there are many others out there that do and that is the problem we face on a daily basis.
I feel your pain. At work we regularly get hit by kiddie bots which keep looking for phpMyAdmin and other stuff. We don't have particularly public sites (niche market) but some of the script kiddies aren't smart/courteous enough to turn down the retry time and we just get nuked.
You guys do a fantastic job with the popularity the site has gotten.
This is the best place on the net I have ever seen. I am yet to find an unanswered post here. I would have given up this hobby long ago had this site not been created. A BIG thank you for the efforts !!!
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