Tried in two browsers now. Getting a 500 Internal Service error. Does anyone know a mirror for the reference section?
Yep seems to be down
I will repost the info posted on the Arduino Forum by David Cuartielles:
Nah!
no DoS, unfortunately we are all the ones to blame … the community likes the forum and the wiki too much and that generates a lot of CPU overload. The conspiracy theory is down now.
Dave will be hiring more virtualization power for our servers, so that the 8 processors will not reach that incredible load level. For those of you interested in this matter, I am going to summarize the history of the Arduino servers a little:
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from the beginning we had an account at Site5, it was super cheap, and -as long as there weren’t that many concurrent users things worked-. We had this account for almost 3 years
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about 1 year ago, when the downloads of the IDE made it to one every 10 minutes, we decided to move to ServInt, then the traffic suddenly multiplied by two. It was the proof that the service we had before wasn’t enough … the sad story is that we couldn’t monitor this problem properly so we could never understand the size of the problem
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while on ServInt, and thanks to a better monitoring software we understood that downloads were becoming a problem … we reached over 1TB transfers each month, therefore we decided to move the downloads to Googlecode, who kindly donated enough space to keep versions of the IDEs for the different operating systems
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taking away the downloads still means over 300GB of data transfer in the server. Again, once we freed the server from the files, a lot of the traffic started to show up on the forum. At the same time the blog jumped from 15.000 visits (not unique) to 150.000 per month
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so the new problem arose about two months ago, on “hot” weeks, we could reach over 15GB transfers daily on only requests to our forum (perl based) or our wiki (php5). This generates a bigger load in the CPU than serving static html files. We are talking that a perl page uses 7% of one CPU, while a php5 service from the wiki takes 4,5%, and a static page 0,0%. I am talking about real numbers I can see right now on the process list in the server. This means that 80 concurrent users on the forum will definitely block the traffic on the server. ServInt has been very kind allowing Arduino.cc to take over much more resources than we had when needed, but of course, now it is time to pay back
The solutions have been explained a little earlier. We believe a combination of hiring more CPU power with improving the software on the server side is going to be the way to go around this. You will notice an immediate improvement in the next hours, while you will see the thing going stronger (hopefully) in less than a month. This will help us developing new services we have in mind like Web2.0 integration (e.g. Facebook, Flickr, Youtube or Twitter modules) in the wiki and forum, one-password-fits-all service, etc.
We have walked a long way until today, but I have the feeling, there is still a long path in front of us.
Thanks,
/d
PS. At this point, I have to thank many people for their support and comments during the last three years on how to handle the server. From Ladyada -who recommended ServInt first-, to Nick -who I got to know on the IRC channel and help me out setting up the mirror service, where you can find copies to the IDE back to version 4-. All your comments are taken into account and we will keep the thing going as long as there are users working and sharing.