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We had a minor site hiccup today. All seems to be working, now.
We have always been open and upfront about the site, so in the interests of full disclosure here is a summary of the problem and steps taken to fix it.
tl;dr Comment counts shown for each story on the main page seem to have stopped getting updated since about midnight this morning; appears to be working now. Please accept our apologies for any who were inconvenienced.
Read on past the fold for details.
Problem: Comment counts on the main page showed "0" comments on recent stories, but opening a story showed the correct number of comments for it.
Actions Taken:
1.) Try bouncing the front-end servers to restart apache (This is a low-risk step that seems to fix a surprising number of issues).
No joy.
2.) Ask for help on the #dev channel on IRC.
Ncommander replied asking if slashd (an over-seeing daemon for the site) was running.
Looked through my log files and on the site wiki; determined that slashd should be running on server: fluorine
ps -AF | grep slashd | wc showed 32 processes
Ncommander suggested: killall -9 slashd
Try: killall -9 slashd
"No process found."
Inspection of output of PS -AF suggested this one-liner should do it:
$(ps -AF | grep slashd | awk '{print "kill -9 " $2}' )
Got most of the processes, but there still seemed to be some stragglers.
/etc/init.d/./slash stop
/etc/init.d/./slash restart
Conclusion:
Looked like it might have worked... reloaded main page... see updated comment counts!
Looks like all is working again.
It's a credit to the staff here that the site has been running so smoothly and without crashing or hiccups for... I can't remember when we last had an outage. Given that in the early days of the site we had maybe a few hours of uptime between crashes, we have come a long ways!
I'm going to assume this is one of those "have you tried turning it off and back on again" kind of problems, and unless the problem re-occurs, assume it is solved.
Need to hurry to get to work, so I apologize for the brevity of this posting.
--martyb
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday April 23 2019, @07:39PM (1 child)
PS: you're probably not old enough, but way back in the day when a new computer would come out, like the Cray-1, people would joke that "it does an infinite loop in 5 seconds".
Ar ar ar.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday April 23 2019, @08:43PM
I am old enough to remember that. When BYTE magazine started, I was in high school. :-)
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.