Site down yesterday (5th Novermber 2019)

Hi,
I think that it may of had something to do with it being bonfire night!

Yesterday we had an outage, this was caused by a failing disk in our RAID array.  Our host was in the middle (without telling us) of changing the disk which for some reason caused the disk requests to queue up, this in turn placed the server under massive load and eventually it fell over when memory and swap disk was exhausted - I knew that you all wanted to know that.
To compound it one of our Hosts Linux engineers took it upon himself to perform some server optimisations, unauthorised by us and he did not take a database backup at all - fuming to say the least. Fortunately I back up every night. He then had to spend the best part of 4 hours recovering what he broke.

All seems well again now.

Thank you for your patience.

thanks for getting it fixed and back up working.

Yes well done and thanks for all your efforts

Cheers!

We continue to make improvements.
You should notice that pages load a lot faster now.

Forum writes are taking about 4 to 5 seconds now that we have the bots under control and have made some other tweaks - we are working to improve that further over the next week with some software upgrades.

Also please note that if you add a lot of images to a post, that will increase the posting time as we have to upload the images to our CDN (content data network) and then link back - just click "Make post" once and wait.