Alexandra Erin

After hovering around the edge of being over my Generic Seasonal Respiratory Infection for most of the Generic Season, I finally went to the doctor today. This is kind of a big deal, because as some of you have guessed I do not currently have health insurance. But health > money and frankly, I’d be making more money if I were healthier. Every time I say “Okay, time to get down to business” I get a day or two of kicking ass and then I’m knocked flat on my own again. It’s a lot harder to get anything done when you’re dead tired and achy all over.

So now I’m on a course of antiobiotics and I have some lovely heavy duty cough medicine to get me through the night, and hopefully this will be the last “update on how sick I am” update for a while. I put up a Twitter message yesterday before taking NyQuil™ saying “come back Sunday”… to explain that briefly: yesterday I slept. Today I’m sleeping more, and not touching my computer except to type this up. Tomorrow I’m going to have a Tales of MU bonus story and then sleep some more.

Monday? If all goes as planned (and the plan here basically being “sleep” and “heal”)… well, just check back in Monday and see.

Whoo, the actual downtime seems to have been fairly minimal and… though it’s hard to tell for sure as activity on the site’s pretty low at the moment… things do seem to be loading up pretty dang snappily again, compared to how they’ve been going.

To everybody who’s noticed the sites lagging badly today, the problem appears to be that the server hosting the database is sluggish. It’s very slow even when I log into the database remotely. The database is where the stories and comments are held, and a slow response from the database makes the page take longer to load. The longer it takes to load, the more likely people are to get the “maximum number of connections exceeded” when they’re all trying to check at once.

My host is upgrading the RAM and CPU on their MySQL machines this Friday. I expect that should improve things. Thanks for your patience.