wonko.com

Uptime down the drain

Wednesday January 07, 2004 @ 06:57 PM (PST)

The wonko.com database server crashed today, luckily without losing any data.

It’s a Windows 2000 box running MySQL. Before it crashed, it had been running continuously without a hitch for 415 days. I still don’t know what killed it, because Windows didn’t bother logging whatever it was. Sigh.

Meanwhile, wonko.com’s FreeBSD web server has regained the lead with 225 days. We’ll see how long it lasts.

Comments

Why windows?

Why do you run the database on windows when you have a BSD running the web server? More servers also meanes bigger risk for crashes.

eiffel

Thursday January 08, 2004 @ 12:19 AM (PST)

Re: Why windows?

The FreeBSD box is less powerful than the Windows box. Back when I was running the Uptimes Project, which was extremely database intensive, this was a big concern. I had the Windows box sitting around anyway, so I offloaded the database stuff to it.

As I've said, the thing ran flawlessly for over a year of continuous uptime. And I mean flawlessly. No memory leaks, no strange performance degradation, nothing -- exactly the opposite of what I had expected.

I suspect that the crash may have been caused by some software I had installed on the box just a week earlier. Nevertheless, I'm working on moving the database to the FreeBSD server to avoid this in the future.