Hostgator 500 Errors in Remission

"Suck it, chumps!"

Howdy, howdy, howdy.

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past month, or are really good at HCC Error Message Roulette, you've probably received a "500 Error" message page when submitting a cap or lifting up the toilet seat to pee. Or you've received 382 of them, in which case I say, good job! That's a lot.

Anyway, it's been a pain in the ass and I feel for everyone who has had their caps eaten by the Hostgator. I personally had three of the best caps ever written by anyone eaten, but you'll have to take my word for that because I refused to type them again, since that would be totally basket.

At first I thought this was related to our web traffic and server load, which is fairly high, especially on Saturday nights. I experimented with turning off some of our fancier features that access the server frequently, and then I made fun of WEIRD_1 in case that would help. There was no noticeable reduction in the rate at which the site completely shit its pants.

Some suggested we change hosts, which is a nice idea, but not feasible for two reasons: One, we're paid up with Hostgator through the year 3000, a move I made both to secure us cheap fucking rates, and also because after the Minneapolis bridge collapse a few years back my family insisted I plan for my own untimely death at the hands of water, and one of the steps in that plan was making sure HCC would keep running at least for a while after I was eaten by the dinosaur that came out of the time portal I'm building in my walk-in closet. So I made sure HCC was paid up for a long while, and made Hippie promise he'd keep the site running after my untimely demise. To which he vowed that there was no fucking way he'd do that, so I guess you guys are on your own.

Aside from the fact that our contract with Hostgator is tied into the Tampa Bay Rays' Tropicana Field lease, the other reason we couldn't just bail on our host is that they have an alligator for a mascot. No, I'm kidding, the other reason is that we have over 800,000 files on our site, most of them screengrabs. If you know much about web hosting, you'll realize that's a berserk number of files and no sane host would allow that, so we're fortunate that the Hostgator isn't paying much attention to our site other than occasionally eating a cap about Brett Favre's dick.

"Thanks, Han!"

Anyway, for all these reasons I thought we were pretty screwed on the 500 error thing. But long story kept long I worked on this last Sunday and believe I figured out the problem, and have created a work-around that I think will cease the error messages. For anyone suicidally bored enough to give a shit: I think the errors were actually being caused by too many simultaneous processes on the server, mostly caused by email of all goofy things, and I've made some changes to keep that from happening. Part of this was Apple's fault, part of it was Hostgator, part of it was the live feed, and part of it was Michele Bachmann existing. As a result of the changes, the live feed might be down a little more often, but that's a small price to pay to make sure the world sees your joke about Miley Cyrus's weird tongue disease.

Anecdotally from what I've been hearing from cappers, this seems to be working, but let me know if your experience has been otherwise or if you're actually a chimpanzee that has learned to type, because wow and we're totally into that kind of thing around here.

Otherwise, I hope your Halloween was the weeniest and I'll see you in the gallery.

-Jazz

Update (11/2): Completely unrelated to anything above, on the night of 11/1 I had to do a restore to the caption database, due to a colossal fuck-up on my part that threatened the very fabric of the universe. Thankfully I was able to restore about 99.9% of what had been lost, but you may see a couple of oddities: (1) Your spotlight cap reverting back to a previous choice, and (2) For caps that were made before 10/13, you may be missing clicks that occurred between 10/14 and 11/1. Sucks, I know, but re-spotlight that shit and I promise life will go on. If it doesn't, eh, good luck finding me.

Update (11/8): Thanks go out to those of you let me know the above fixes reduced, but did not eliminate, the Hostgator 500 errors. Based on that feedback I did some more work on the site last weekend and believe I've, at worst, reduced them to a rare occurrence. Let me know if I'm deluded on that front. The trade-off is that the caps/clicks/chat auto-refresh in the gallery doesn't refresh as frequently now, but I'm not sure if anyone would have noticed that if I hadn't pointed it out just now.

In somewhat-related news, I'm unofficially moving the Live Feed to an "I'll turn it on as a treat periodically" feature instead of an "I try to keep it running 24/7" feature. Aside from the fact that the Live Feed is a giant pain in the ass to keep running, and doesn't get capped all that much, it was also partly responsible for both the 500 errors and the recent fiery death of my home computer. Considering that we have no shortage of material for everyone to cap, right now I think the best solution is to limit the Live Feed to Saturday nights and holiday special occasions. If this makes you sad, hum a happy little tune and think of strawberries.