└ posted on Friday, 11 October 2013, by Novil
After two weeks without problems, I’m now confident that I have found and fixed the cause for the webserver problems on 25 and 26 September.
Two security plugins for WordPress were the offenders, “Acunetix WP Security” and “Ultimate Security Checker”. After the last update, the first one began to carelessly make many long-running database queries. Meanwhile, the second one had inflated WordPress’ crucial wp_options table over the course of time. I guess a webserver which is no longer online after a database crash is kind of secure…
This shows that some functionality that might be beneficial for a website with 1000 page views per day can be disastrous for a website with 100,000. Apart from deleting the two plugins, I worked on the website backend during the last two weeks to further increase its performance.
└ posted on Tuesday, 1 October 2013, by Novil
Katie Tiedrich of Awkward Zombie nails one of the worst parts of being a comic artist/writer apart from having to deal with webserver failures:
But I think even worse than the pictured example or a just plain wrong “correction”, is a correction which might be 5% more accurate, but which would also completely ruin the joke. Fortunately, only a tiny fraction of our readers are as rude as StrawGuy2009 when they complain about something in the comment section.
PS: Tom Nook & Co. are raccoon dogs, not raccoons! So Katie should have called them “raccoon dog guys”! I wish the author of these comics actually knew what she was talking about or cared about zoology!
└ posted on Thursday, 26 September 2013, by Novil
Unfortunately, the webserver issues are more severe than I thought. There might be a problem that some script running on the website requires too many resources. Therefore I have deactivated all WordPress plugins and the comment section. It will take a while until all features will be activated again since increasing the stability of the webserver is now the most important goal.
└ posted on Wednesday, 25 September 2013, by Novil
The webserver running sandraandwoo.com had a serious storage malfunction and was offline for a couple of hours because of it. All your comments made after Tuesday, 24 September 2013, 01:30 CET, are gone. My latest database backup is exactly two hours older so there is nothing I can do to bring them back. I think my webhost Hosteurope handled the issue well. A technician had a look at the defect server although it’s 1 o’clock after midnight here in Germany.
└ posted on Thursday, 12 September 2013, by Novil
3D printing is still pretty expensive. But it already seems to offer lots of possibilites for custom-made sculptures. Several weeks ago, I purchased the following Final Fantasy VII action figures of all main characters in their original low-poly design. I got them at Shapeways, but apparently they are no longer sold by their creator. I really like how they turned out. They look exactly like in the game. Although the rough surface of the gypsum-like material is neat, I wished a less fragile material would have been used. Aeris’ left ribbon broke off after she accidentally fell over and I had to glue it back on. Nonetheless a very cool set of action figures.
