synatic|blog by Benedikt Deicke

Somehow a funny story … but actually: not at all. I was sitting in car and traveling to the train station when I received the first SMS. The Nightwish.com server is getting slow. As we posted the studio dairy of Nightwish’s new vocalist on Sunday, I wasn’t much surprised and not worried. We had some minor problems on sunday evening, directly after posting the diary, but were able to resolve them quickly. About an hour after the first SMS, while sitting in train, I got a second: The server isn’t responding anymore at all. Funny thing to know everything is going as wrong as it can and only being able to write this text about it (offline of course). I decided to move from Apache and mod_php to Lighttpd.and fastcgi, as fast as possible. The server being down today is clearly a big fat warning sign flashing over our heads. I doubt the box will survive the 30th …

I managed to switch to lighttpd after arriving back home in Fulda. Had to change the CMS a bit, but nothing special. The cause of all the problems was apache using about 150MB RAM for each of it’s processes (up to 150) on the 2GB RAM box. Everything is running better and faster now …

I’ll keep you up to date … ;-)

I just finished upgrading nightwish.com to Debian 4.0 Etch. Took me some time, but worked without any notable problems. (Thanks to the excellent documentation)

This was just another step in embattling the server for the 30th of this month. We’re expecting a lot of fans overrunning the website, as the identity of the new vocalist is going to be announced this day.

It’s done! My first Rails application is online. Hope it works fine … :-) Go visit http://shop.uftg.de/ and order some merch …

I’ve been visiting Hamburg for two days (Sunday and Monday) lately. It was great. It’s been a while since I last visited the city. (I think it must be about four years or something) Surprisingly not much changed, at least the at the places I visited again. I’ve also had the chance to meet Christian, with whom I’m working on nightwish.com for some time now. Together we went to see, among others, Tarot at the Earthshaker Roadshock. I really enjoyed it. The venue (Markthalle) was quite small but yet very nice (okay … the air conditioning sucked) and the bands rocked the stage. Can’t wait to get there again. :-)

I just finished reading this article by Paul Graham. It’s quite interesting so take a look at it!