Comments on: Tech Crisis: Need Help

By: Bilby

Bilby — Mon, 15 May 2006 03:05:34 +0000

My office is at City West, but I’m spending a lot of time at Mawson Lakes. The IS staff are City West, but as I’m half IS and half IT I get to move between the two.

By: Shai Coggins

Shai Coggins — Mon, 15 May 2006 00:08:48 +0000

Bilby: Ahhhh… that makes sense! And, that is so nice of you to say. Thanks!

And, wow – you must be very busy trying to juggle both your work and your PhD. Hmmm… this might be a bit much to ask, but are you based in Mawson Lakes, then?

By: Bilby

Bilby — Sat, 13 May 2006 01:38:51 +0000

Sorry, what I meant was that I hoped the database problems don’t cause any hassles with your blog, making your blog suddenly disappear so that I miss out on reading it. Fortunately it sounds like everything is cool again.

As to UniSA: a bit of each. I’m one of the academic staff in information systems/computing, teaching programming, databases and web development type stuff, but I’m also finishing off my doctorate. Of course, I expect to be finishing off my doctorate for a *very* long time to come.

By: Shai Coggins

Shai Coggins — Fri, 12 May 2006 04:41:21 +0000

Bilby: Thanks for the insights and for trying to help. I appreciate it. I still have no idea how to prevent the situation from happening again, but at least things seem to be okay right now. I did a database repair as soon as I got access to my control panel. Hopefully, if I run such repairs every now and then, it will prevent such things from happening again.

Oh, and on enjoying your blog: I don’t think that should cause any problems. Why do you think it would?

BTW, I noticed your UniSA email and blog addy. Are you studying or working there?

Aaron: Yep – that’s why I’m hoping we can finish the migration ASAP. Thanks!

By: Aaron

Aaron — Tue, 09 May 2006 03:46:25 +0000

Oh boy. We need that db to finish the b5 migration. Nothing can happen to it. Can we get a backup?

By: Bilby

Bilby — Tue, 09 May 2006 03:18:20 +0000

I’m afraid that I don’t know your exact setup, thus I can only surmise. Nevertheless, the “_ncls1″ strongly suggests that it is Nucleus that is causing the problems, one way or the other. The spiking load could refer to getting tons of hits recently – but I’d be surprised if you could get sufficient hits to cause this sort of complaint from the ISP unless they are rather small. It is possible, though. More likely there is a corrupted record or something similar which is *far* too big, and when accessed slows everything down. Or, as a really bad senario, someone has hacked into you database and is using it to do Very Bad Things (extremely unlikely, but possible).

I’m not sure what the best option is, but I’d lean towards getting someone to have a look at your database and seeing if there is a problem with any of the records. If it is a single corrupted record it should stand out. I’d also suggest checking for upgrades to Nucleus (probably won’t fix it, but it is worth a shot). If it is simply a case of becoming very popular, you might want to move over to something which doesn’t rely so heavily on the database for the CMS.

Sorry that I can’t help more – I don’t have any experience with Nucleus, I’m afraid, and it is hard to track down these problems without accessing the data.

I’ve been enjoying your blog though. Hopefully this won’t cause any problems.