Why this site had problems yesterday
I got the following e-mail from Keith this morning on why this site had so many stability problems yesterday.
I've not got some more detail on what happened yesterday... One of my clients took it upon themselves to install a game server on our machine, renamed the executable to "java" to hide it, and started hosting head to head games on our machine. They ran up about 7 GB in traffic and sucked the life out of the server. By our doing a 'kill -s 9 java' and then restart then JVMs, it did kill their server until they started it again. I finally tracked it down by seeing all the bandwidth on a non-standard port and finding an executable named 'java' running it, but it wasn't the JRE java that one would expect. Anyway, just in case this happens again I've got some more RAM going in to the box tonight starting with the server that is currently the hot backup. You may see 15 minutes or so of downtime tonight when we move over to that server and bring the current one down for it's memory upgrade. Keith
Phew! It's good to know it's not Roller that's causing the problem, but some bastard hogging all the memory. Was that you Simon?
Posted by Simon Brown on April 30, 2003 at 06:04 PM MDT #