The Site With the Lamp

August 3, 2004

Ouch. We have had two server outages in two days. It's a painfull affair for a small company like ours. Our ISP webquarry was very prompt as always in restarting the server but they are as puzzled as we are as to why this keeps happening.

The latest crash happened just after we released version 1.31 of our SFTP Applet - fortunately it happened before we made the announcement so it isn't as bad as it might have been.

I don't think Rad Inks is big enough (yet) to warrant denial of service attacks but yet for the last three or four months we have had the server die on us during times of peack usage. Interestingly this seems to happen mostly during the first weeks of the month. Could it be that all the spiders are making frequent visits at this time?

The Spiders of the reputable search engines are all polite blokes. None of them would dream of accessing the sites fast enough to cause the servers to overload but what may be happening is that several bots may be crawling through the sites at the same time then perhaps the load could become a might too much.