For a period of a few hours today, Hipcomix and its other related sites experienced some downtime. This was caused by a slight glitch in the members area image database.
There are approximately 100,000 hits to that database an hour. Session data, cache information, count updates, comments, and a few dozen other bits of information are accessed every single time either a photo, or it's thumbnail in the album preview page is accessed. To be quite honest, how this information refuses to get corrupted every 5 minutes I'll never know. It's a very solid system, but as we learned today not infallible.
The system began seeing performance issues roughly noon Saturday. It was reported to me by Doc Robo in the latter part of the weekend. I checked into it, but assumed it was just heavy weekend traffic. Over the past two days the system began to continue spiraling into a performance loophole. Each request had to time out, and as each person overlapped, the server worked harder and harder to keep up with the overlapping requests. Today, a few of our members pointed out that the site was grinding to a 3 to 4 second response time per request. My first initial attempt to repair it caused worse damage. I had to take the site completely down and manually rebuild the tables for the session data.
I'm happy to report that the glitch in the database has been repaired, and the system is back up to 100%. Members that have been with us for a long time know that these things happen from time to time, and I usually take care of them quickly.
If you do notice something odd with the performance of this website, don't hesitate to email me at
admin@hipcomix.com. I may not respond unless you request of response. Otherwise I spend an hour replying "Thanks, I'm looking into it", instead of actually looking into the problem.
I want to thank everybody again for your patience during our infrequent system problems. These usually happen about twice a year. So I will talk to you all again in about six months, lol.
Thanks for reading, Jpeger 
