Recent Hiccups May 2016
We faced some blackouts recently, and it was because we got very popular in china. The images that was generating lot of traffic were violating our TOS, but as they were generating lot of traffic and I thought it was a good time to stress test our image delivery systems. At first we were handling the load fine. after some time our redis server start acting wired. the issue was with dumping the db to disk, but as the images were generating lot of data the redis server crashed. we started to migrate the all gif images to be served by our CDN while still collecting views data. but at some point our real time stats handling script started to fail due to redis connection issues. after that the data started to collect and the redis server crashed every time it was started. While all that was happening we noticed that our php front end started throwing errors. this was due the connectivity issues to our redis server. The image serving end do not use redis server and was not afflicted. its usi...