Please help! TrackDollar is down!

I haven't been able to get onto TD is several hours. Please help, Markus. I need my TrackDollar fix.

Tony

Heh, I noticed at 1:32am central. It's back up now though, as of 7:29am central

I've been unable to get onto TrackDollar this morning. Please help, Markus! I need my morning TD fix!

Tony

It's working again. I can get my pre-work fix. Thank you, Markus.

Good morning everyone,

I had a few bills to enter and have been unable to access TrackDollar. Anyone else having this problem?

Tony

Well, it's back up and running. Markus, whatever you did, it worked. Thanks.

Tony

Uh oh! It's down again.

Well, It seems to be up now, as of 5PM Eastern, when I checked in.

I've been extra busy at work lately and didn't see these forum items until now (5 pm EST), sorry.

I see that the site is up at the moment. I will check it later tonight.

Yep. Back up and running. I was able to get my bills in so I could go spend them on groceries for the week. Whew! That was a close one. . .almost had to spend unentered bills.

Tony and Sara wrote:Yep. Back up and running. I was able to get my bills in so I could go spend them on groceries for the week. Whew! That was a close one. . .almost had to spend unentered bills.

Heaven forbid!! That would be sacrilege!! Oughta be illegal!!
And it oughta be illegal to come across a marked bill and not enter it...all you non-trackers out there!! LOL!!

TD seems to be down this morning. Can get into the forums just fine, but not into the main TD page.

I'm having the same problem.

Tony and Sara wrote:I'm having the same problem.

It's been down since 2329 last night (I'm in the central time zone) and is still down as of 0826. I tried telnetting in to reset the server, but I don't think that that is working right now either.

sends2aaron wrote:

Tony and Sara wrote:I'm having the same problem.

It's been down since 2329 last night (I'm in the central time zone) and is still down as of 0826. I tried telnetting in to reset the server, but I don't think that that is working right now either.

Aaron - I just tried to telenet myself and it didn't work for me, either.

Hello everybody,

the server did run out of memory and froze up. The service answering the telnet reset request was frozen too. I was the whole morning out of office without internet. Sorry. Since 12:30 EST server is up running. Looks like I have to rent more memory.

Markus

Admin wrote:Hello everybody,

the server did run out of memory and froze up. The service answering the telnet reset request was frozen too. I was the whole morning out of office without internet. Sorry. Since 12:30 EST server is up running. Looks like I have to rent more memory.

Markus

What would the new monthly fee be? Or if you'd rather not divulge that in a public forum, maybe you could send a mass PM so that we'll know how we can help if we'd like?

Full? How can that be? We only have 118,281 entries. It is alot but I find it hard to believe that would fill up the server. Then again maybe I say that out of ignorance. I don't know a whole lot about how servers work. Oh and I should be sending out my annual contribution next month. It is not much but it should help.

Hi,

not the hard drive was full. I have space enough for about 125 million bills. The working memory (server has 1 GByte) was not enough. This also happens sometimes when a machine is switched on for a few month and the memory pool has heavy fragmentation. A reboot took care of it. However this memory is also used when a lot of user sessions are open and if these sessions do big queries on the database server. if this keeps happening I am going to increase the memory to 2 GByte.

Markus

Admin wrote:Hi,

not the hard drive was full. I have space enough for about 125 million bills. The working memory (server has 1 GByte) was not enough. This also happens sometimes when a machine is switched on for a few month and the memory pool has heavy fragmentation. A reboot took care of it. However this memory is also used when a lot of user sessions are open and if these sessions do big queries on the database server. if this keeps happening I am going to increase the memory to 2 GByte.

Markus

Can you timeout the sessions? If so, can you time them out sooner?

Admin wrote:Hi,

not the hard drive was full. I have space enough for about 125 million bills. The working memory (server has 1 GByte) was not enough. This also happens sometimes when a machine is switched on for a few month and the memory pool has heavy fragmentation. A reboot took care of it. However this memory is also used when a lot of user sessions are open and if these sessions do big queries on the database server. if this keeps happening I am going to increase the memory to 2 GByte.

Markus

Wouldn't a monthly defragmentation take care of the problem? Yes the server would be down a little while but hopefully you can set it up to happen automatically somehow and do it say 3am on a Wednesday when traffic is at it's lowest. Just a thought.

Hi,

the sessions do have a time out, however after longer research I found the problem.

a spider crawler was and still is visiting TrackDollar, same spider from soso ignoring the standard robots.txt where I set a crawl delay of 3600. This spider is connecting from 16 different IPs and with every visit creating a new session. Well it was crawling the "Forgot Password" page and submitting empty data. And here was still a bug in the software not handling empty emails the right way. I hate spider database that ignore the robots.txt standard. They create tons of traffic on my server. I don't mind when the google or yahoo crawler is visiting to check TrackDollar, but well this spider is checking from Japan every 45 seconds and constantly changing the IP so that you can't block it.

About the fragmentation:
The memory fragmentation is cleaned up by a reboot. Not like a hard drive defrag what is running for a while. I guess I will start doing the reboot once a week, better 3 minutes down time planed than once more a down time for couple hours.

Markus

Admin wrote:Hi,

the sessions do have a time out, however after longer research I found the problem.

a spider crawler was and still is visiting TrackDollar, same spider from soso ignoring the standard robots.txt where I set a crawl delay of 3600. This spider is connecting from 16 different IPs and with every visit creating a new session. Well it was crawling the "Forgot Password" page and submitting empty data. And here was still a bug in the software not handling empty emails the right way. I hate spider database that ignore the robots.txt standard. They create tons of traffic on my server. I don't mind when the google or yahoo crawler is visiting to check TrackDollar, but well this spider is checking from Japan every 45 seconds and constantly changing the IP so that you can't block it.


Markus

I am not exactly sure what you said here. I will just assume it means something is getting in and using up space. Spider crawler? Is that the search engine you are talking about? If so I didn't know it still existed. I hadn't used it for almost 10 years. I use Yahoo and google almost exclusively as I'm sure most people do. I tried ask Jeeves but I just don't like it.

Matt,

A spider is used by more than just Yahoo an Google. It is simply a software robot that crawls around from place to place seeing what goodies it can find. In the case of Yahoo and Google, it reports back new web content so that those search engines can report those results the next time you do a search.

A spider is one of the many tools used by hackers, spy agencies and other cloak and dagger types.

As Markus tried to explain above, this one from Japan happens to visit frequently and leaves a mess. It may not be really doing anything other than camping out, but then again, it has already shown itself to be a pain.