...as you already know if you tried to drop by SEB.

The day started with the webserver crashing repeatedly during the night and then suffering from maxed out resource loads for most of the day. Part of it appears to have been another round of Googlebots overwhelming the server for no apparent reason, but even after that storm passed the VPS was still reporting higher than average load despite my inability to identify what the problem was. When I got home from work I put up a static page on SEB until the Googlebot finally stopped trying to index the entire site and that allowed the rest of the blogs I host (Mom’s, Cindy’s etc.) that get much less traffic to start functioning again. When I could finally make SEB functional again the load was still way higher than normal. Late last night I put in a tech support ticket with the folks at TekTonic that we rent the VPS from and they were going to take a look and see what they could see. This morning things are considerably improved, though still sluggish. No word from them yet on what the issue is/was or if it’s my own incompetence or something beyond my control that was causing the issue. On the plus side I managed to identify several people who have been stealing bandwidth by hotlinking to images on SEB and put in place an anti-hotlinking measure. Mostly idiots on MySpace who think there’s nothing wrong with hotlinking to images hosted elsewhere, though at least one person on a message forum had hotlinked to my SEB T-Shirt ad for no apparent reason. Hopefully it won’t affect the RSS feeds, but if you are reading via RSS and suddenly find that all the images in an entry have been replaced by a famously disgusting image known around the Internet as “Goatse” then let me know so I can fix things properly for any affected RSS aggregators.

If all of that weren’t enough I managed to completely hose my PC here at work yesterday morning so I spent a good part of my day restaging it instead of working on trouble tickets. That meant that for a good portion of the day I couldn’t check in on what was happening with the webserver because my machine at work was TKOed. There’s few things more aggravating for an IT Guy than not being able to figure out a problem and not being able to figure out a problem combined with not being able to check in on the problem is one of those things. By the time I went to bed last night sometime after 1AM (and due to get up at 6AM) I was again seriously thinking of chucking it in on the whole blogging thing. After sleeping on it I’m a little more optimistic I may be able to work it out, but it may mean chucking ExpressionEngine and going with a different package. A prospect that excites me in no way at all.

So, if you can read this then things must still be chugging along for the moment. If you can’t, well then there’s not much point in saying anything further.

Update: Just heard back from the TekTonic support team. Turns out the server had a runaway backup process that was attempting to do 10 backups at once and that was overloading everyone on the server. They’ve killed off the extra instances and things should be back to more or less normal around here now. I’m so very glad it was a problem beyond my control as I was tearing my hair out trying to figure it out.