I've twice had HostMySite shut down my site because it was generating FileNotFound errors (based CFINCLUDEs and such). I was surprised to hear that such errors could destabilize the server -- is that a CF thing, or an underlying java issue?
The problem is when errors pile up on a high-traffic server and you start to requests timing out (which was happening with my site). Once requests start timing out, things get further queued up and soon you get a server failure. If you have repeated failures under high load it can be hard to restart the server. On a shared server, you have much less control over restarting applications than you do on a dedicated server. On adobe.com, for example, we can restart ColdFusion without bringing any applications online and then initialize each application independently so there isn't the huge load on the server at startup time.
Care to share a little more on how you are able to init each application as you bring the site up?
I had the same problem out of mxna before, so what I did was I only check periodically for the webservice, I hit it, and store the time I hit it, then when subsequent requests come in, I only hit it again if it has been a certain amount of time since the last time I hit it. I also had to put in there where if it took too long, I would just forget it and not display it, then the next time would check again.
Does this have anything to do with you running fb 5 or is it some other issue?
I've had a huge (much more than normal) spam increase the past few days. Hopefully that isn't an underlying issue.
Tom, well, it's application-specific (almost by definition). Our scripts do whatever is necessary to prep the cache. It would be like having a Model-Glue application that only appeared online after you'd run the first request to initialize the framework and data caches. Does that help explain it?
Ryan, I did the same (caching MXNA results in application scope). However, HMS had to restart the server and my site was being spidered at the same time so hundreds of requests were queuing up waiting for the MXNA web service (as well as posting empty forms - thank you Googlebot! Yes, it follows "action=" in forms, as POST operations, without submitting any data!).
Peter, no, this was not a spam attack.
Interesting, mention the word 'spam' and you start to get content free comments from spammers.