Confessions of the Profession Down For Labor Day Weekend
September 4, 2017 — There is nothing worse than planning to enjoy Labor Day weekend and having a sudden outage of a website. In this case, Confessions of the Professions began to have performance issues starting on Friday night. If you were trying to visit, it is likely you experienced errors or slow page loading times. This was quite embarrassing and we were diligently working to get this fixed, trying to isolate issues by removing javascript and other things we thought were affecting the website. Into Saturday morning, things seemed to get better and the website was loading normally.
It looked as if we just had some traffic overload with a server that was unable to handle such a load. Unfortunately, this only lasted for several hours until the website started showing signs of performance issues yet again. We began the process all over again, trying to figure out what could be causing this issue, even thinking we were under attack by brute force bots attempting to break into the website. The website was down for most of Sunday. We worked hard to try and figure out what could be the cause. As we were etching closer to figuring it out, it seemed to look like a caching issue in which the database and the website were not communicating properly. Attempting many times to figure out this issue, we were unsuccessful. Again, most of Monday yielded similar results and by Monday night, the server that this website sits on died. We could not get it to start, restart, or even boot up. The only option was to delete the server and start afresh.
Luckily, when the issues began to arise, action was taken to immediately back up everything that we had, database and files. By Tuesday, we had the website functioning normally again but we were missing some files and a few things from the database had not saved properly. It is hard to foresee some things happening and while we try to prepare as much as possible, the website simply went down during a holiday weekend. So most of the weekend was spent worrying about Confessions of the Professions.
We were able to restore everything and as of September 6, 2017, almost everything is back to normal and in operation. We’d say the website is about 90% functioning the way we had it and we are still working to get it back to where it was. This 10% is likely to be unknown by our readers, as the 10% pertains to meta data and search engine optimization. We appreciate your patience and thank you for being a reader and contributor. We do take your confessions and articles very seriously and do our best to maintain their safety and security. As far as the final cause of what we determined: corrupt caching of the database. The website and database were simply not outputting the correct information. We are on a brand new server, a brand new database, and a brand new website, though it may look the same, we are working hard to ensure that our downtime remains very low.
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