Brion Vibber wrote:
First, I sincerely hope the upcoming upgrades replace whatever part of pliny is defective and has caused crashes regularly ever since we've had the machine. (Unless it's software. Who knows?)
Second, a note: the wiki is designed to fall back onto cached pages if the database server isn't available. *But*, often it ends up spending an inordinate amount of time trying to talk to a server that isn't there, and doesn't give up like it should.
A manual workaround is to go into LocalSettings (rather, CommonSettings) and change the server IP from the real one to localhost. It'll talk to the local server, find no database by that name, and crap out immediately.
A clean, automated way to mark the server as Dead Dead Dead would probably be good.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Thanks for that info Brion, I was wondering how to do that. Given another half an hour I probably would have worked it out for myself, but the middle of a server crash is probably not the best time to be browsing through DatabaseFunctions.php trying to decipher code.
Better than an automated way to mark servers dead: database replication. Maybe if I say it often enough it will just magically materialise :)
Alright, maybe magic materialisation is unlikely. How about I start converting the PHP code to use two separate sets of DB functions, one for reading and one for writing? I believe that's a necessary precondition for replication.
-- Tim Starling.