It seems like yesterday’s problem returned again today, sadly. I’ve contacted my provider and they have moved the server to a different switch. Initial results show the problem has now vanished. Then again, I thought the same thing yesterday. We’ll only know for sure if the problem stays away in the long run.

There were some issues with the site which caused things to slow down significantly to the point it was causing dozens of uploads to fail. The cause of these issues was packet loss. Packet loss basically means that not every “packet” transmitted by the server reaches it’s destination, which means it has to be resend, which slows things down considerably. At the same time the slower connections were causing files to stay open for longer on the server, eventually causing “to many open files” errors which presented themselves as “500 Internal Server” errors to visitors. Fortunately the server provider was able to fix the network problem and I’ve made configuration changes so that “to many open files” errors won’t easily happen again.

The second phase of the server move is complete. c.imagehost.org and www.imagehost.org (main site) have now also been moved, and new uploads are being served from the new d.imagehost.org location that also resides on the new server. I had originally imagined the server “letters” to represent physical servers, but for now they’re “virtualized”. There were a few bugs to iron out (SQLite seems to think its busy timeout is something it can ignore if it feels like it) but as far as I can see everything is working well. If you notice a problem though, don’t hesitate to contact me at support@imagehost.org

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As I wrote in the Performance issues post below, I’ve ordered a new, much faster server. The first component of ImageHost.org to be moved to this server is a.imagehost.org. As this server has a different configuration, it took some time to adapt the scripts. Everything should be working, but in case you find a problem please contact me at support@imagehost.org

Last Thursday the hard drive of server b.imagehost.org ran out of space. In order to clear up some space, I then ran a command which accidentally deleted a couple hundred files that shouldn’t have been deleted (ouch). Fortunately the affected files were still stored in a backup, but it took a few days to come up with a solution where I could restore the files intelligently (without restoring everything). If you notice a file is missing: don’t worry it’ll be back within 24 hours or so. Note that this problem only affected non-hotlinkable files. Hotlinkable images and thumbnails were not affected.

As you may have noticed from time to time, the site can be slow or throw errors. Needless to say I’m aware of these issues, but unfortunately it’s not easy to solve right away. Some of the issues come from the fact that I didn’t plan well enough ahead when I wrote the site scripts about a year ago. There have been about 1.8 million file uploads since the relaunch, and certain scripts are straining under these amounts of files.

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Previously there was a “news” page for information regarding ImageHost.org, but as there was no convinient interface for editing this page, I hardly updated it. WIth this new blog, I can log in from anywhere at any time to post news and status updates about ImageHost.org. Plus you can also comment on any news posted. Note that to prevent spam from being posted, all comments are moderated.