The memory problems have been sorted out. It seems the version of MySQL we were using had some issues with memory management, but it looks like the newer version is running fine. You can report any remaining errors to me.

Sorry about the trouble.

Don't worry, we are aware of the "out of memory" errors you may find, especially when browsing the forums or loading band discographies.

We're investigating what's causing the memory leaks and we'll fix it as soon as possible. Sorry about that, we'll keep you posted.

Hello,

You might experience some downtime at around midnight (Eastern time) or after that, for hopefully not more than 30 minutes. Just some routine maintenance and optimizations, nothing serious.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Uploads are back, rejoice.

Good news, everyone. As you have probably realized, the switch to the new server was successful. The new machine has been handling the site's load quite well over the past week and the real site search is back to (hopefully) stay.

Oddly enough, a few people have said to actually prefer the Google search, so I have added a "Google" option to the search drop-down, if for some unfathomable reason you still want to use it and are too lazy to actually go to Google.

Also, I will now be disabling image uploads for some time while we transfer the images from the image server to the new site server. This will take a couple of days I expect, sorry for the inconvenience.

Once again, thank you very much to everyone who has supported the site and made it possible for us to get this bad-ass server (two quad-core CPUs and 12 GBs of RAM, for the curious).

Hopefully the last one in a long, long time - this is a real deal.

If you remember the story about the senior technician who had basically saved our site from our crappy host back in late December/early January (news posts here), well, you can know that for this whole time we have been with him, and you certainly noticed the site being far more stable than it used to be. We were on a sort of semi-dedicated server hosted by this guy, instead of the crappy old shared hosting.

Still, it was not entirely satisfactory. The downtimes were rarer but still annoying, and the old search still kills the site within minutes whenever we try to put it back for everyone.

So we are finally taking the step to go on a very powerful, fully-dedicated server with better support. The migration should be finished today, but in the meantime, the site may suffer from downtime or SQL or PHP errors and the likes. If this happens, don't worry, they will be fixed ASAP. Also there is always the matter of DNS propagation (see the link earlier, it mentions how to flush your DNS cache), so if the site goes down, it may take longer to reappear back to you depending on your location.

About the search: you must realize that the old search was, unfortunately, a complete resource hog that can easily paralyse even a powerful server. It is also very difficult to optimize it further without compromising some of its features. We're hoping the new one can hold its own against the onslaught of traffic, but we cannot know for certain until we test it.

Once again, thank you for your patience and comprehension, and thank you again to everyone who donated or helped us through the affiliation links.

Our image server is in Houston, which is currently out of power due to hurricane Ike, so no images or uploads until they can fix this.

Sorry, blame Nature. :)


EDIT: It has been fixed, just in case someone hasn't noticed...

Sorry about the downtime tonight. We're doing some tests with the search.