Ok, so it has been a really long time since I've posted any news, so I figure I would.

Some of you may have noticed that we have had some intermittent downtime recently. I was trying to set up a development site so that I can doing coding and whatnot to the site and not affect the people browsing the site, as things don't always work the way you expect them to when coding. Needless to say, I ran into some snags, which resulted in some downtime for this site. I finally got it up and running the other day.

Fast forward to today. I've been getting some emails lately about processes failing on the server, so I figured I would ask the host about them. Turns out, we were running out of memory on the server. I think this had to do with 2 instances of the software running at the same time. Even though one was a test environment with no users, it was still using resources. As an initial fix, I went ahead and upgraded the server's memory. It's going to cost me an additional $7.50/mo., but I think it will be worth it.

During this whole fiasco, I have noticed in the past few days that the search system wasn't working properly either. I assumed that this was another process that was potentially failing, but it wasn't getting restarted link the other processes. So I asked the host about configuring it the same as the others. Well, for the next 6 hours, I would get an email every 5 minutes saying that the search process failed and it was restarted. Thinking the dev site was still causing havoc, I decided to take it offline. Well, that didn't happen. After several discussions with the host through the 6 hrs, we finally figured out that the guy who initially set up the reporting most likely set it up wrong. So I've been chasing my tail for nothing.

Anyway, hopefully things will start to calm down for me. And, hopefully the increase in memory will help out the speed of the site somewhat. And, once the reporting of the search gets set up properly, hopefully we won't have a non-working search anymore. Needless to say, lots of hoping is happening on my part.

As a final thought, I would just like to thank everyone again for making the site what it is. Hopefully everyone enjoys hanging out as much as I enjoy trying to keep it running.

Brad