h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I know it's difficult to keep it all up and running, but it keeps me away. This is my first post for three or four days. I've even given up trying to lurk - it just takes too long. I wondered whether I should write a journal about something I did, then couldn't be bothered.

I all, we're really sorry about this, it's very annoying we know.

We've got the problem that to keep the site up with the amount of visits it gets, we have to search pages from a cache, and that cache is getting full a lot quicker these days.

Basically, each time a page is requested it asks the database for parts of it, does some processing, gets it all together and sends it back. Unfortunately doing that every time takes a lot of server power. So what the system does is it saves a copy, then the next time someone asks for a page, it sends that saved copy to them. This works rather well for the entry pages, but not so well for the forums.

Unfortunately, again, because h2g2 is popular, a lot of entries are getting read and they're filling the disk space, which means that each time a page is requested the code has to remove an old cached entry to replace it with a new cached entry, and this brings the site to a halt. You may have seen this a couple of times when we first moved off the bbc servers, when h2g2 became completely unavailable.

The bbc solved this problem by throwing a *lot* of hardware at it.
We've put a bit of code in place to clear the cache of the older entries automatically first thing in the morning and later at night. We found when the site itself as a whole was quite and scheduled them in then. Again, unfortunately, there's a *lot* of cache to clear, and it's getting more and more each week. So clearing it takes longer.

Whilst it's clearing you will occasionally (more often than not at the moment) see server time out messages, but you should also still be able to read the Guide itself.

We know what we've done is not a long term solution, however the new version of the site we've got in the pipeline uses a completely different (and hopefully far more efficient) caching system, so once that's launched we're hoping these errors will be a thing of the past.

A sort of Arthur Dent/cup of tea scenario, then.

Lots of text What stood out was: "because h2g2 is popular"


Good luck with ironing out the creases

"We're a victim of our own success..."

"Victims, aren't we all..."

Yes, there most definitely is, TC.

Your word processor isn't internet dependent...