I will be purging all private messages tomorrow of all inactive members who have not logged in for 6 months or more in an effort to reduce the 700,000 (and growing) messages that I believe are the main cause of our website performance woes. If this is insufficient I will need to look at the number of messages being utilised by active members as well - but there will be ample warning given before anything is touched there. In the meantime, I'm painfully aware of the ongoing issues affecting the site. It is related to memory utilisation from extremely large queries and some inefficient code.
OK - any member who has not logged in since 1st July 2014 - sorry, your PMs are gone, as are PMs of former members who were banned or left. Got the number of PMs down to about 450,000. Still 8 members with 4000+ messages, 28 members with 2000+ messages, and hundreds with 1000+ messages. If database performance (unrelated to the DOS attack that is) continues to suffer, I will need to act on old messages from more active members.
Might it also have to do with the number of larger uploaded images? (Some do get pretty big.) And do you think maybe there were some DOS attacks that were relatively tame leading up to the most recent huge one, which could have played a role in performance during the weeks beforehand? Just throwing out some guesses. Obviously those behind the scenes know better than me.. Thanks for your efforts!
The overnight DOS consumed all of our disk space with logging - that was what initially brought the site down - but in the process of crashing a few things got corrupted. Image uploads use a fair bit of disk, but they reside outside of the database, so they don't have any impact on performance - once they're viewed by one user, they get loaded up to Amazon anyway, so they don't create any traffic issues. Image uploads aren't really an issue. From looking at the logs, it looks like the DOS has been quietly ramping up, and compounded a few existing issues like database performance which was apparently flying closer to the wire than I expected. Annoyed I didn't find it earlier - it was hitting the root of the site, not forums.silverstackers.com - so the requests were being logged somewhere different. In the last 24 hours the traffic volume just exploded however. It's not necessarily a directed attack - just some malicious BOFH in China picking an Australian IP address to thwart Bittorrent users at the ISP he/she works at. Lazy way of doing their job with ramifications "in the west" they don't give a rats about.
Who keeps 4000, 2000 or even 1000 messages ? Why on earth would you need to keep so many .Probably the same people with hundreds or a thousand facebook "friends " lol
"BOFH" For the other non-techies out there, I had to look it up. I like to stay hip to the kids lingo. I'll save u the time; http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastard_Operator_From_Hell
He was one of my contemporaries when I was doing CompSci Need more space for your thesis? Sure, there's more space now - I just deleted all of the files for you that were using all the space up. Those files were your thesis? Well, hope you have a backup. Go away now.
how can they have 4000+messages? 100 message on 1 page and i think the max page is 30...anyway you can delete all my messages but the first 2 recent ones. its good to read all the old stuff sometimes
