But there is a very strong possibility that this problem is fixable.

Do we know if ita's recoding to make sure we closed SQL connections had any effect, are we in even slightly less dire circumstances?

We're in slightly less dire circumstances. The changes helped some. The new server helped a lot. It bought us some time. I'm hoping [*crosses fingers*] that the removal of the random quote generator cuts our usage in half.

At half, we'd still be at higher than acceptable levels but well within sight of meeting that goal.

But the down side seems to be that even if we do meet that goal, we're at a point where we can't put in any new threads without going dedicated.

We don't know that yet. Let's see what happens with the code. Someone could find a glitch and it could drop us far below our ceiling.

That would be happy-making for everybody invovled, I think.

Cross-posted with Board:

With all this talk of dedicated hosting, I feel like I should explain something about that option. Call it a warning or a disclaimer or whatever. A dedicated server may not necessarily be the best solution for us and it certainly won't solve all our problems.

Yes, when all is said and done, we may very well end up needing a dedicated server. But people should be aware that the kind of dedicated server we will be able to afford, as a community, will be significantly less powerful than the server we are residing on currently.

The server that we were on before? The one that we slowed to a crawl before they suspended us? That was probably more powerful than what we'd end up on with our own dedicated server.

Of course, there are some upsides to dedicated. The most obvious is that, no matter how much we talk, no one can boot us. Another is that while we have fewer resources at our disposal, we don't have to share those resources with anyone. But connections that aren't closing will bog us down and any server sluggish and slow, dedicated or otherwise.

I sense that some of you are impatient and want to just find a solution already but please keep in mind that, no matter where we end up residing, debugging the code and finding ways to streamline operations is essential to the future health of this board.

Just something to keep in mind.

Thanks for the clarification, Kristen. I do hope you don't feel like people are beating you up about this. I understand it's going to take a little time to debug the code and see if any of the fixes are sufficient. And there may be other fixes we haven't thought of yet that might help as well.

I think we're all just trying to be helpful and may be tripping over each other a bit in the effort.

No, I get that. And I know a lot of the conversation is simply talking out loud to see which ideas could work and which won't.

But I don't want anyone running out and buying us a server because they want to be the nice person and solve all our problems. Because it won't really solve our problems. It'll just postpone them for awhile.

This might be a stupid question, but how is it that we can figure out what is causing this-- what sort of bug might be in the code or if it is just that we talk so much? I am not particularly technically literate, and it seems like there are other sites on the internet that talk as much as we do!

I'm not a debugger or a coder so I don't have a clue how to track it down. But the problem that we're having is using too many concurrent MySQL connections. Our limit is 50 and, the day we went down, we were at 200+. We know that 50% of those were quotes and we can disregard those for now. Which leaves us with approximately 100 or so connections to worry about.

That number means that were 100 connections to the database open at the same time. In order for that to happen, 100 separate users would have to either submitting a post or loading a page all at the same time. Given that we only have 1000 registered users total, and I think I'm three of those myself, the odds are against that scenario. [Unless we have a bigger lurker population than I was aware of.] Especially given the time and what level of activity we were seeing that day. That's what's saying bug to me. It seems like, for some reason, connections to the database are being opened and are not closing.