I am 99.5% sure it was the quote generator.

But since we don't know *why* the quote generator caused the problem, we'll probably cause the same problem with the next feature implemented.

It would really pay to get to the bottom of this.

I'd be happy to look at the source code. I can probably even run it on my system at home, since I just installed MySQL and PHP for another reason.

Anyone who wants to do some investigating into this phenomenon off the server in their own time is more than welcome to. Insights will certainly be appreciated.

> If you want the list, either e-mail me, or I can post it again: basically, it says "CVS repository; Move search out of beta (

The list is at Am-Chau Yarkona "Buffistas Building a Better Board" Jun 26, 2003 6:41:51 am PDT. Isn't CVS a done deal? I thought that Rob got it set up and ready to use, based on ita "Buffistas Building a Better Board" May 9, 2003 4:05:12 pm PDT. Would the CVS let us, for example, roll back the change we made by adding explicit closes to all the functions, without touching the other changes we made since then? That would be handy at times like this.

Anyone who wants to do some investigating into this phenomenon off the server in their own time is more than welcome to.

Jess PMoon, Liese S, and I think Michelle T were looking at the SQL code. Rob, ita asked them to drop her a line at her profile address so she'd know where to send it, or maybe you could ask one of those three to forward you a copy.

Is PHP installed as a module or a CGI wrapper on our host?

eta, what version of PHP is running on our host?

All the config info you could ever want, insent, Rob.

I spent a lot of time investigating PHP and MySQL last night and learned a lot. I wanted to share some of it with everyone because I think some of the things were doing to limit connections to the database might put even more load on the server. I'd like to recommend that folks not change their reading habits a lot until we figure out exactly what's causing the excess load.

I now have a tiny little Phoenix board running on my Mac at home for testing. I've been digging into the source code of PHP and MySQL (gotta love open source) and I'm starting to understand how this all fits together.

I now suspect that the problem isn't so much too many connections, as too many MySQL threads running at the same time. Each thread uses exactly one connection, but we're allowed to have up 128 of them cached. Recently ita checked and we had 58 threads in the cache, only three of them running, but 26 of them holding a connection. I don't think the cached threads are every deleted, so eventually we'll max out the cache.

Now this new server has a 5 minute idle timeout (as opposed to the 8 hour default), so that might explain why only 26 of the cached threads have a connection. But the threads themselves consume a lot of resources, so they might actually be what's causing the server problem, more than the connections themselves.

I'm looking to see if they can limit our use of threads without affecting other MySQL users on the server. I think there might be a way to tell Apache to limit the buffista.org domain to fewer concurrent threads, which would limit the MySQL threads as well.

I give up.

Noo, don't give up, Kristen.

Hang in there. Rob's in geek Sherlock Holmes mode, which is all for the good.