Yesterday we experienced a bit of downtime. The blog was down between 3:30 AM to approximately 5:30 AM PST. The reason for this is a bit higher volume of traffic than normal, as we got featured on Slashdot (again). The server we run this blog on is certainly capable of handling the load, it was just a misconfiguration in Apache (MaxClients set too high). We did tune Apache in the past, but the MaxClient-value probably got overwritten when we upgraded till Apache 2.2 last month. Hence, when the Slashdot traffic started to drop in around 3:00 AM PST, the server started to swap heavily and eventually became almost entirely inaccessible.
Again, we apologize for the inconvenience.
Author: Viktor Petersson Tags: internet, maintenance