News from Jan: About the weird Website Crashes

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I just wanted to give folks updates. I have been EXTREMELY CONCERNED by the Website crashes of recent days. For about 30 hours my website was unable to function. In the end, after recurring problems, I decided to upgrade my server, despite the additional cost, so that I have double the memory and double the processing power. I hope it helps for response.

I did notice that about 2 days later, the websites did crash once! The real reason they are crashing is because certain processes run out of memory. I have established this clearly beyond any doubt. And there is a LOT more memory available. Even so, the one remaining crash does bother me a bit.

While investigating past crashes, I found another weird thing. I could hardly believe my eyes when I discovered that there were 2 enormous spikes of crashes of my website and they occurred a month apart to the day! The first one, which rendered my websites almost out for a day was on 23th March 2021. And then the next set of nightmarish crashes occurred on 23rd April 2021. So that is something really weird. Inbetween the crashes were otherwise rare, and the most that occurred would be like 5 or 6 on a day. But otherwise the trend was flat. However, these unbelievable spikes, of 85 and then 128 crashes in a single day are weird.

Perhaps it means some kind of computer process is at work? I will have to monitor this monthly.

I am thinking of making other changes as well to the server. I suspect it might be a long time before I fully establish what else might be at work. But I’m hoping that things are much smoother since I’ve beefed up the server massively. I am very concerned by outages, especially when it lasts for hours on end. It’s very weird. But I’ll keep trying to diagnose it.