"Service Temporarily Unavailable"

[sarahrah]

I keep getting this message.  I don't know if anything or what can be done.  I just thought I'd let you guys know.

Service Temporarily Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

I get this message but if I keep trying I eventually get through.  It's probably because the demo just came out and so many people are flocking to the website - i don't know - but anyway.

Thank you!

[Rosella]

Yeah. Everyone's getting that half the time they try to load a page.

You're right; it IS because of the high traffic. Just keep trying.

[koko_99_2001]

Kels is right Deloria and I were talking earlier about how many times we'd have to hit refresh, but we'd eventually get through. Was just annoying since we were both trying to split/edit/merge posts

[Petra Rocks]

 I'm sure you peple know this but if you can't handle 30 people on the site at once you may want to take steps to make sure you can before the game is released.  Even a moderatly succesful game site can see 50 users or more at once at peak time.     

[koko_99_2001]

I don't think it means 30 people on the site, but just the massive amounts of downloads happening. But the team is working on getting mirrors set up, so no worries

[Yonkey]

It's actually probably more like 300 people accessing our site at once.  30 are only looking in the forum, but if you watch the trilogy and refresh it every minute or so, you can get an idea of how many people are on that.  As well, there is a Stats counter on the Home page that measures who is viewing, and how many times in total for the past 2 months.

Anyway, we now have plenty of mirrors so we no longer need to link the demo to our site.  The site (and forum) should be way more stable now.

[dew7]

Thanks it seems stable now.   

[Yonkey]

Yes.  I found a few causes of the problem.  First, the forum search was not using an efficient way of searching fulltext indexes.  The SMF developers have promised to have this fixed in RC3 of the forum software, but in the interim I have restricted all search results to a maximum of 5, rather than unlimited.

As well, I have disabled the Who's Online feature, since that's what our host was saying was causing a large amount of server load.

As a more long-term solution, I'm planning on shopping around for a secondary VPS or dedicated server for our site, and moving our forum there, as well as any large bandwidth item, such as future demos, trailers, etc.

[Jokabi]

I have tried to download the patch several times, but it only ever lets me download about 18% before claiming its finished. I have opened the file to check but always comes up with errors.
Any suggestions?

[TribeHasSpoken]

Thank you for bringing this to our attention. Please try downloading the patch from one of the following mirrors:

Orange Lounge Radio
Adventure Island

[Yonkey]

Welcome Jokabi!

The problem you're having is most likely because of the server load issues we're experiencing.  I'll be transferring over the forum database (which is the cause of it) to a VPS tonight.

[noaheugene20]

I had the same problem. It would always say the server was down. I do hope you guys will be prepared when the first part of TSL comes out, because there will be a lot of people! 
The sever is way more stable now though.

[Yonkey]

It's pretty rare for it to occur now.  The forum was down for a day at one point, but that was more because I was a bit too busy to fix it.

Anyway, chances are we won't be hosting something as large as Shadows off our main site.  It would probably go straight to mirror sites & Download.com.

[Yonkey]

Hey everyone,

I apologize for the site being down for most of today.  We were having some technical difficulties with the hosting company.   Everything should now be working again.