Intermittent Blog Failures...

My blog is dying every 1 to 5 hrs and I'm not sure what is happening (it suddenly started to run out of db connections about a week ago). I'm looking into it and hopefully will get that fixed shortly. Sorry for the lack of responsiveness.

Update:

It appears that the success of my lovely wife's iPhone games are to blame. This site has been hosted on a mac-mini since June of 2005. The box never had any problems serving up quite a bit of content from my java blog even when I was near the center of a tempest in a teapot about JBoss and was getting thousands of hits a day for about a week my mini never complained. The average hit count per day was between seven and ten thousand hits a day. Then...

A friend of mine wrote two very cool iPhone apps, Connect4 Touch and Tic Tac Toe. While my wife and I were in the theatre waiting for National Treasure 2 to start a couple in front of us way playing Connect 4. Two days later I start getting AIM hits from my wife asking how to do this or that with Javascript.

The result has been a bit of an increase in the traffic on dudney.net and the little mini that could. December's daily average hit count was 7,700, Janurary was 55,000 and so far in February the daily average is 130,000. And all that from a mac mini. The culprits are iKala (mancala), Ball Blast (which is currently in the top 10 games on Apple.com, way to go!) and the latest Alien Defeat. If you are so inclined go check them out.

One of the coolest things about getting into this is that it's been a family affair. My 12 year old son wrote about half the code for Alien Defeat and came up with the idea. He also made the icon (which is one of the coolest icons ever for an iPhone app IMO ;). And my 10 year old made the background images for both Alien Defeat and iKala with Blender. The Dudney software factory is in full swing :)

Back to the tech: from what I can tell Apache was consuming all the memory (because of my config, fixed now I hope) and causing mysql and java to swap out. Then every hit on my blog was causing a massive bit of swap activity, and causing mysql hits to timeout, and boom my blog would croak.

I think I have apache limited now so that my blog has enough breathing room. Lets hope so anyway, my wife is about to release a fourth game in the next week or so, might be in the market soon for an XServe :)

Update 2:

Ordered a new intel mac mini to replace the G4 mini. its just not able to keep up...