About The Site

I just wanted to give everyone an update on the site problems today, and what fixes we put in place. First of all, let me offer my sincere apology for the outage and for any stress it may have caused.

Please remember to check out Twitter feeds at http://twitter.com/rotwnews and http://twitter.com/rotwalerts if the site is unresponsive.

We've been trying to track down a service level failure when the site became saturated for a few months. Unfortunately, when the site's saturated, all hands are focusing on restoring the site and updating content, and, by the time we get the resources in place to troubleshoot the main problem, the traffic has died down, and we are left guessing. Some of those guesses paid off, and we increased out concurrent users from around 2,200 to 3,500. But, after that point, the site degraded, and we lost availability.

We finally tracked down the problem to something called "KeepAlive". This setting keeps the connection from our server to your web browser for a period of time, in case you're going to request anything more, like photos or other graphics needed to show the page. Having this is good. It makes the site display faster on slow computers and computers with slow connections. But, with everyone staying on the line for 15 seconds longer after a 2-3 second page display, we quickly ran out of connections. So, we reduced the "KeepAlive" to 1 second. This effectively has given our web server the ability to server 3-5 times the number of concurrent users. Now, our slow downs are coming from the database server. But, they're manageable.

We now have nearly 5,000 users online RIMOFTHEWORLD.net. This is something we couldn't do this morning. Thanks for your patience and understanding.

Regards,
Scott Straley

Love ya Scott! Hope all is well with you! Still on the East Coast??

This is rare (hopefully) and I thank you and your staff for doing what you can to figure out the best options for your site.

ditto!