Ok, I reduced the number of photos per page from 15 down to 9, so it should cause more clicking to get to the next page, but should alleviate some of the connection problems. I've also fiddled with the templates a little bit, which should also help as the pages should now cache rather then pull to include and compile every time which will reduce my CPU usage. I'm still looking at ways to continually fix the problem and will probably switch my entire site to using the Smarty template system, but it's pretty much just a band-aid to fix the current problem but will not actually FIX the big problem.
I talked with my hosting company, as well as several other hosting companies, and all of them laughed at me when I told them my CPU usage, average connections, and required web space. Basically what I got from all that I talked to is that I should be grateful that my current host has been as accommodating as they have been. I basically have traffic on Monday and Wednesday that is crazy nuts, but the rest of the week is pretty light. My host was fine with the excess abuse because I never crashed the system, however after A Happeee Place and the 1,400 photos that Xer0 and I took, when I was uploading the pictures and people were trying to download them at the same time it caused the server that I'm on to almost lock up! Because I am on a shared machine the admins have to make sure that no one website puts the other websites in danger and throttled my connections down.
I have contacted support and asked them to review my connection throttle as my site has been switched to PHP5 (which killed the calendar but I'll fix that later) and changed a few other things around. Hopefully they'll up my throttle but I'm not holding my breath. So...where does that leave the site?
Unfortunately I've hit a point where the site is breaking the point of running for free. The Google AdSense has been good up till now to pay for hosting but it looks like I'm going to have to pay for a private / dedicated host to actually FIX the problem with the website. What I've decided to do is leave it up to all of you on what you want done. If you would like to help WhaddupNow by making a donation check out WhaddupNow.com - Donations.
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-= UPDATE November 20th, 2007 @ 10:36 PM =-
Dream Host seems to think that I'm having problems with accessing the server with MySQL connections but I'm not 100% sure as they never mentioned anything about MySQL connections in their first e-mail. Still working on a workaround but it's, unfortunately and regrettably, taking longer then I would like.
I promise that I'm doing everything within my power to fix this as fast as possible!
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-= UPDATE November 20th, 2007 @ 4:02 PM =-
Hey everyone, I'm still waiting for a response from tech support on how to fix the problem. I'm also researching some alternatives that might reduce the load on the server and limit the connections without giving you the dreaded white screen of "Service Temporarily Unavailable" death. You CAN just click refresh and the pages will load eventually, but this is by NO means what I want everyone to have to do so I'm working on getting the connections cap released. Hopefully I can solve the problem with it in its current state because the next option will probably swapping the gallery over to a virtual server, which unfortunately, isn't really in my budget at the moment.
I'll keep you informed as things change.
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-= UPDATE November 20th, 2007 @ 12:15 PM =-
So it looks like my host has imposed a connection limit to my Ravers.WhaddupNow.com domain name and everything associated with it. I've sent in a request to see what I can do to fix this problem.
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-= UPDATE November 19th, 2007 @ 10:52 PM =-
Ok, so I figured out what the problem was. Apparently there was a problem with my .htaccess file being placed in the wrong spot which is why it kept asking for the password. I fixed that but it seems that people are still getting red X's where some pictures should be and there are people getting "Service Temporarily Unavailable" screens.
If you still see the password screen pop up do a manual browser cache refresh by holding SHIFT while clicking REFRESH on your browser and that should solve the problem. As for the "503 Service Temporarily Unavailable" problem I'm looking into that.
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-= UPDATE November 19th, 2007 @ 10:30 PM =-
Ok...so it looks like the pictures are working for me on Firefox but not for anyone else using Internet Explorer.
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-= UPDATE November 19th, 2007 @ 10:10 PM =-
Ok, it looks like everything is up and running! Sorry again for the problems!
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-= UPDATE November 19th, 2007 @ 4:45 PM =-
Hey everyone, there seems to be a serious problem with database corruption with the Raver Photo Gallery. I'm going through now and backing up the current directory structure so that I can replace it with a snapshot from before. I'll post and let you all know when it's back up and running!
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-= November 19th, 2007 @ 3:43 PM =-
Hey everyone, sorry for the password thing when you try to view the gallery.
Unfortunately last night I was working until 6:00 AM to try and get the photos done and was uploading Obvious' photos while watermarking Xer0's photos. I thought I would catch an hour nap, as that was how long it would take to watermark 500 photos, and wake back up to do my second watermark review, then upload them, but I ended up sleeping 3 hours instead of 1 my phone (Damn Blackberry!) crashed and my alarm didn't go off.
When I got up I had found that the watermark process failed and I needed to redo it thus causing the delay until 12:00 PM. Finally I got them all done and ready to upload at 1:00 PM and they were uploaded at 2:30 PM. I started adding them to the gallery when people started viewing them.
Normally this is no problem because it's late night and there are only a few people looking at the album while they are being uploaded, however since I was doing this mid day too many people visited while I was doing a CPU intense process of adding pictures that my server crashed and corrupted the file database. Immediately when I saw that I could not fix the error on the fly I put a password lock on the directory so that I could load backup of the MySQL database to see if that would fix the problem......it didn't.
I've contacted support and am waiting for a phone call from them to see what I can do to get the gallery back up online ASAP!
Once again I do apologize for the inconvenience. I'll work on steps to see if I can fix this problem from happening in the future.