The database is unavailable

Why is this "Error The database is unavailable. Try again later.." situation getting more bad? Is there a problem with the whole website and anybody knows when the problem will be fixed?

This should not be happening to a high-quality art repository, really ridiculous to eventually break the F5 key with repeated presses just to refresh the page till it works again.

If its not spitting out that message, it's often spitting out 502 errors... something is seriously wrong today

it's been like this for almost an hour, and nobody said anything in the forums, so I thought it was just me.

TARDISES said:

If its not spitting out that message, it's often spitting out 502 errors... something is seriously wrong today

Yeah. And the error is IP address-specific as well! Let's say, if my PC's IP address starts between 192 and 220, the website fully works. But the issue is if the IP address starts between 110 and 191, this error kicks in.

Plus most ISPs use the DHCP system to refresh their IP address llsts, so the admins need to something about this.

To add to the issues, I haven't been able to access the server status page for the last hour or two; it always errors out.

sammyG said:

This should not be happening to a high-quality art repository, really ridiculous to eventually break the F5 key with repeated presses just to refresh the page till it works again.

You're free to spend the unpaid hours of work to diagnose and hopefully fix the issue.

Looks like the site's partially back. Pages are loading... but I'm getting a lot of timeout errors now instead.

So it wasn't the only Me which got the same problem too.

So, basically we're back to the original problem of the site being incredibly slow and getting constant timeouts.

sammyG said:

This should not be happening to a high-quality art repository, really ridiculous to eventually break the F5 key with repeated presses just to refresh the page till it works again.

This website is free, has no ads, and the owner is paying thousands of dollars a month out of pocket to keep this website afloat, without any financial incentive to do so. There's no paid industry professionals staffed to do site maintenance. Given the sheer amount of content being uploaded every minute, the insane site traffic this has, and the abundance of third party websites scraping Danbooru at all times, it's miraculous this site is even able to stay online. I genuinely have no idea how this website is even still up and running.

Site is back up. The database server had a failed fan and two bad sticks of RAM that were replaced.

It took a long time to diagnose because at first it appeared that the database server was overloaded and stuck at 100% CPU usage. Normally when that happens it means the site is under heavy load because of bots or scrapers. I spent a long time trying to reduce bot traffic until I finally figured out it was actually bad RAM. I'm still not sure how exactly bad RAM led to 100% CPU usage.

This was probably also the source of the random "The database is unavailable" errors over the past weeks. This tended to happen when the automatic database backups ran. It was probably triggering the bad RAM and causing the database to crash and restart. It was hard to diagnose because I never suspected bad RAM could be the issue.

evazion said:

...

Thanks again for your hard work on the site evaz!!

Thank you!!!

Thanks for the hard work evazion.

As has been said before, let us not take this website for granted. People do work hard and do spend time and money to keep it running purely for our entertainment and it's always important to remember that. Downtime is of course frustrating, but never to the point where taking it out on the people doing the work is the smart or correct thing to do.

Thankful those unavailable database errors should be gone/greatly diminished (?). They've ate my tags while uploading many a time.

evazion said:
...

I've had bad RAM issues before myself while building a database. It would be worth running any validation checks there are as some bits could have been erroneously flipped while being processed.

Thank you for your work, evazion. It’s great to have the site back!

Thank you mr. John Danbooru we can now go back to our regular activities with normalcy

@evazion thank you 🙏

evazion said:

Site is back up. The database server had a failed fan and two bad sticks of RAM that were replaced.

It took a long time to diagnose because at first it appeared that the database server was overloaded and stuck at 100% CPU usage. Normally when that happens it means the site is under heavy load because of bots or scrapers. I spent a long time trying to reduce bot traffic until I finally figured out it was actually bad RAM. I'm still not sure how exactly bad RAM led to 100% CPU usage.

This was probably also the source of the random "The database is unavailable" errors over the past weeks. This tended to happen when the automatic database backups ran. It was probably triggering the bad RAM and causing the database to crash and restart. It was hard to diagnose because I never suspected bad RAM could be the issue.

I still can't upgrade to gold

I didn’t even notice it went down lol