Some of you might remember about a year and a half ago (I think) I switched servers.

PFA is on a dedicated server (actually a virtual private server, but I digress), and it was running quite well. Then it started having high server load issues. At first I thought it was a DOS attack, but it wasn't. In fact, I wrote a program to thwart most forms of DOS attacks, and it wasn't catching any.

From examining the running processes, I saw that the server load was occurring mainly due to both http calls and mysql calls. While there are indeed a lot of web page requests (http) and database calls (mysql) here, nothing significant had changed, yet these calls were causing the difference between load averages of 0.2-0.8 in the past to ones like 40-100 in the then-present. I couldn't figure it out, especially because it didn't appear that one user or person was causing those high-load http/mysql stats.

I contacted the tech support people at the host company. They don't work for free, but they are better at sysadmin stuff than I am, so they looked into it. Three different techs came up blank. Nobody could figure it out. I actually got my money back for their services because everyone sheepishly admitted they were stumped.

I came up with my own idea that perhaps something had gone corrupt within the server that was very hard to diagnose/discover, and that switching to another one might be the answer. They dismissed my idea, but finally allowed me to give it a shot.

Despite the fact that I backed up the PFA software and database and restored an exact copy on the new server, the problem was fixed. Same traffic, same database calls, but suddenly the load average was back to under 1.00 and everything was cool.

Now I'm starting to see something similar happen. Load averages keep spiking up intermittently, but tonight it was as high as 188 (!!) when radio was supposed to start. I don't believe it was a DOS or DDoS attack.

This time, however, it was all mysql calls that were the problem.

Question: Is it possible for a database to be corrupt, but then operate normally when it is backed up and restored on a new machine? I would think no, but perhaps I'm wrong on this one.

Thoughts?

I really don't feel like switching again (it's a huge pain in the ass), but I can't keep having this problem with radio like I did this week.