Site is experiencing a "hug of death"

Hey everyone, It's great to see the site continuing to grow! However, that growth also means some of our resources are starting to reach their limits. In this case, it's our database instance, which looks like it needs an upgrade to a larger one. While this "hug of death" is happening, I've temporarily disabled a few of the more intensive database queries overnight to prevent things from completely melting down. So tomorrow I'll be investigating and most likely moving our database to a more powerful (and unfortunately, more expensive 🥲) instance soon. Thanks for your understanding, and sorry for any inconvenience this might cause! Cheers, Simon

I don't know if this is useful feedback, but today I noticed that all my messages (apart from the new ones) were gone, and that the notification button at the top was not showing any number anymore... But happy to hear that the site is getting more traffic ;-) Good luck with your investigation!

Yes, notification and inbox queries are hot loads that I changed to let the server & database breathe a little. it will be back to normal by tomorrow (my experience told me not to do server surgeries in the evenings 😅)

Thank you!

I'm a DBA if you need any help exSPANDing the database or migrating it ;)

...'and unfortunately, more expensive 🥲' ... Should be doable with some extra paying members. So guys get a premium membership if you can afford it and keep the site fast also for the ones that share fantastic pics but don't have the funds to contribute in money! 😘

POST MORTEN in this screenshot you can see the "hug of death" more clearly. it doesn't mean we got 25x more traffic than usual. it means that the database instance was running on 100%, and everything above that will cause a small wait time for the next database request. this accumulates, until you get to a pile of requests that is never decreasing, but increasing slightly. NOW THE GOOD NEWS I completed the resource upgrade of the database instance. I can see it's now sailing incredibly smoothly. on top I will try to optimise the hard hitter queries to the database, to give the poor instance a bit time to breathe. ✅

Thank goodness you know what you're doing....   Technology is not my friend.. lol Thanks for all you do for keeping us up and running.