My apologies for the downtime on the website today. It looks like the site was unavailable from a bit after 8am until nearly 11am. The problem was a database that failed in a bad way. Normally if a database fails, the webserver just goes on to the next one in the pool. Unfortunately in this case the database was responding just fast enough that the webserver would wait for it rather than move on. After a few hundered connections to a web server started hanging, the webserver itself would start to falter, and before long it would stop serving web pages. I normally have 5 web servers working in tandem, but 30 of them wouldn’t have been enough to fix this problem.

The bad database has been removed, and I’ll replace it later this week or early next week. Again my apologies for the absence of the website this morning. If you were among those who emailed me this morning, I will be responding to you as soon as I am able to get caught up.

Thanks,
Chris