SubscribeWe’re up and running again!
What a day! It turns out the co.mments server had an obscure bug, very simple to fix but also hard to identify. I noticed that bug before, but it happend so infrequently that I couldn’t determine when or why it happens. Today, it started showing up much more frequently on many WordPress blogs.
The bug causes the server to enter an infinite loop, eat up memory and stop processing requests. Tracking a conversation on one of the many blogs that exhibit this behavior caused part of the server to crash, and instead of seeing an error message you would get no response. It happened on too many blogs at once, that all that load caused the entire server to crash repeatedly.
To add insult to injury, the load on the server was so high it would take several minutes to restart, and then a few more minutes to come crashing down. Unfortunately, my attempts to keep it running while fixing the bug only worsened the situation, and the entire site was down for most of the day.
Thankfully, once I found it, the fix was easy. The bug is squashed, co.mments is up and running, speedy and responsive, and has already caught up with all of the day’s comments. No data lost.
We’re back to normal. Thank you for your patience.
Posted by Assaf in Announcements on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008. You can follow any responses using co.mments, leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
http://openid.aol.com/cpoteet04
January 29th, 2008 at 10:41 pm
Thanks Assaf. Any chance you’ll be rolling out new features soon?
D. C.
January 30th, 2008 at 5:11 am
I’m really curious what your revenue model is. You’ve got a great service that I use every day, but for all I can tell you’re picking up all the costs yourself with no one paying you anything, not even advertisers.
Michael Meiser
January 30th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
FYI,
Why do I have to login to co.comment every time I use it anymore.
It seems the “keep me logged in” feature does not work anymore.
It used to work across multiple browser sessions.
My use of co.mmments.com has declined in direct proportion to the hassel of having to login over and over and over.
Just thought you might like to know
kobak
January 30th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Thanks, co.mments.com is great, and I use it everyday too!
Assaf
January 31st, 2008 at 12:08 am
D.C, maybe advertising if I can find a good ad network, I’m not too happy with AdSense.
Michael, I’m not seeing any logging issues on my side, I’ll e-mail you to figure out why it happens.
I’m not planning on new features, but will be rolling out bug fixes.
http://pratham.name/
February 3rd, 2008 at 7:02 pm
Assaf,
Your RSS feed (for this post) has spam links in it.
mitchell2008
February 4th, 2008 at 11:16 pm
would mind sharing how did you fix the bug? and also, just curious…have you thought of naming the bug, just like “bugs bunny”…i know it’s funny.
keep it the good work going… cheers!
Assaf
February 5th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
Spammers … they take so much cleaning after!
Mitchell, it was basically a loop that would search & replace repeatedly (couldn’t be done in a single regexp, I tried), and under some conditions it would search but not replace, and so would end in an infinite search loop.
I only name bugs that take a long time to fix, this one was too trivial to deserve a name.
Adrian near Seattle
June 12th, 2008 at 11:18 am
I love your service, and use it often via my Google Reader.
You rock, thank you!
Babarum
June 18th, 2008 at 8:07 pm
Thank you for co.mments, I tested many services but this is the best.
You wrote you aren’t planning any new feature but bugfixes.
I have just one question: can we have a “Recheck all” button?
Thank you again
Babarum
Assaf
June 21st, 2008 at 1:33 pm
I’m going to look at that for the next update.
Lady Madonna
July 10th, 2008 at 12:57 am
Hi Assaf,
I’ve been using co.mments via feed for a couple of years and I love it, but lately, it seems comments get longer to refresh, and some times they even don’t refresh at all, until you try to subscribe again or go to the tracking page, search for that particular conversation and press “Recheck”, which is not easy if you follow a lot of conversations.
Is there anything going on that could be the cause of this issue? Anyway, the “Recheck all” button suggested by Babarum could be very useful in these cases.
Thank you.
Assaf
July 12th, 2008 at 11:13 pm
There was a bug and the server just stopped checking for new comments. It’s catching up now, except to see all the new comments soon.
Chris
July 20th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
Nice. good news. Thanks Assaf for putting in the work and
sharing with us.