META: Extremely Naughty Gateway

Submitted by MonkeyMan on

I have become rather familiar with the "Bad Gateway" message and have a few questions:

1. What causes this?

2. How is it fixed?

3. How much does fixing it cost?

4. Will it get worse?

5. Is the server is powered by 4000 Hamsters running on wheels in shifts and, if so, who feeds them to make sure they have enough energy? 

Bronco648

October 31st, 2014 at 4:06 PM ^

1 - too much internet traffic directed at this web site
2 - adding moar web serverz!
3 - TONS
4 - Yes, UM has an AD to hire and head football coach to fire/hire.
5 - Brian's cat or Henri

biakabutuka ex…

October 31st, 2014 at 4:08 PM ^

Gateway timeout is equivalent to 2000 people wanting to get into Disney World at 8am and they all plan to give up if they can't get in in under 10 minutes. Replace people with site requests, disney world with mgoblog and 10 minutes with a few seconds.

I believe this site is hosted on Amazon Web Services, so it should in theory be able to automate the scaling up and down of resources as they are needed, but I've never configured this so I can't say how easy it is to do. You could also change the timeout setting, but after, say 30 seconds, even the most patient person is going to walk away.

biakabutuka ex…

October 31st, 2014 at 4:19 PM ^

You're right, they're on dreamhost. I'm kind of surprised. But if they were on Amazon, the scaling up and down would not be automatic unless you made it so. Otherwise, they would be able to charge you more without your authorization.

Edit: they may instead have a VPS from NOC4Hosts, and Dreamhost is just the public dns server. Or, Dreamhost and NOC4Hosts are the same. Either way, the IP address I'm seeing is located in Tampa, FL which is also surprising. I'd go for something in Chicago.

ChicagoGangViolins

October 31st, 2014 at 4:55 PM ^

 

That unauthorized advertising is verbotten here, and worse they are a legal client of mine, but for 100% genuine performance please consider migrating the MGoBlogs to SingleHop: https://www.singlehop.com/

Tell Dan Ushman the Michigan community loves us some SingleHop.  That might get you a rather fine arrangement.  0.02

 

Erik_in_Dayton

October 31st, 2014 at 4:09 PM ^

Small dogs feed the hamsters.  Monkeys feed the small dogs.  Gorillas feed the monkeys.  And robots feed the gorillas...It's a far more efficient system than it sounds. 

Tater

October 31st, 2014 at 4:37 PM ^

WD has earned every MGoPoint he has.  It can be reasonably argued that his letter, which was the first one in the media food chain, played a role in hastening the departure of David Brandon.  Brian's subsequent piece on DB letters to fans was great, but WD started the ball rolling.

LSAClassOf2000

October 31st, 2014 at 8:32 PM ^

Well, it was severe enough today that a couple people, so I noted, stepped forward to help Brian potentially alleviate these issues, both on this site as well as on Twitter, so hopefully in the future MGoBlog can handle its elation and misery without being next to impossible to access for long stretches of time. Pretty sure I hosed a few people opening multiple tabs earlier and hogging connections.