Cyborg

iTrader: (8)

I think I might have accidently deleted someone elses thread? I posted to it, I was the first to reply. When I submitted the post it showed up as Post #1, not post #2...even though I was replying...So I deleted my post and I think it might have deleted the thread, that belonged to someone else.

Nautilus

iTrader: (15)

It was my thread... and after it was deleted.... it wouldn't let me post for like 20 mins... I kept getting a message saying something like " You are not allowed to post new threads every 10 sec"

777

iTrader: (21)

That's very wierd. I've seen quite a few wierd things like that here lately. Just read that someone replied to someone's post 30 minutes before it was even posted

Nautilus

iTrader: (15)

That was the problem here... when I posted my thread it said it was posted @ 9:30... but It was only like 8:45.... So when cyborg posted... his reply was posted before mine so when he deleted it it deleted the whole thing... I think brains fixed the problem though

Brains

iTrader: (7)

I wish vBulletin was written to use the SQL server's clock for posts, that way all posts would be in order no matter which of the three servers the user happened to be on... Any time the clocks get out of sync for any reason, this type of stuff can happen.

So, guess that just means I'll have to hack the code some more

kidkl

Not trying to stir anything but I am assuming this is linux... why not run ntpd on all the servers too keep the clocks synced with the atomic clock?

Brains

iTrader: (7)

They sync every 60 minutes already -- but -- we get a lot of posts in 60 minutes

Not to mention, occasionally the cron job runs and the time server is either unavailable or times out and you miss the update.

kidkl

If you run ntpd and you tell it in the config to create a drift file it will eventually learn the amount that each clock skews by and then try to automatically correct it to keep it more insync. I have seen on some servers running vb or phpbb where at times the server load is well over 150 but I have never seen one of those servers that while running ntpd get the system time off by more than a few seconds.

One thing that you may want to try is (from your post it sound like you have 3 webserver and 1 db server or db server cluster) syncing all of the webserver clocks to the database server and the database servers clock to the atomic clock. If the db server is not publicly accessable you could try syncing all the webserver clocks to one server and then sync that one server to the atomic clock. Either way I would Imagine that it would be hard for the server times to get over 45 minutes out of whack from each other.

One thing I noticed is that you said you have a cronjob syncing the server times, ntpd should be ran as a daemon so that it is always running and adjusting the server time.

Anyway, I dont mean to come off as telling you how you should run your setup. Because, to be honest this is one of the better forum implementations that I have seen.

Brains

iTrader: (7)

Why **** around with all that, when you can just use INSERT ..... UNIX_TIMESTAMP() instead of INSERT ... $SomeObscurePHPTimeVariable ... ? IMHO that's how it should have been written in the first place. That's the way every other enterprise multi-server software package that I've seen is written.. Do you think banks could get away with inserting the local station time into the database and be able to maintain accurate accounting?

I daemonize as few extraneous processes as possible -- if you run an extremely high-load server, you should too Granted, ntpd is pretty lightweight, but the less running the better. An hourly clock sync is fine, because if your clock drifts more than that, you have serious hardware problems. The issue this morning was when the server was restarted (which is rare unto itself, but I digress) the clock ended up being about an hour off.

kidkl

Of course using the database server time would be prefered (sometimes you ever think WTF was that guy thinking when he programmed it that way?).

The only reason why I brought up ntpd was becuase, wihtout knowing the server was rebooted, the clock seemed to get way off way quick, which would either be a hardware bug (but you would have issues with other apps since the linux system time is a counter running in realtime and not based off the bios clock at all) or in some cases a kernel bug.

Either way the fact that you have a vb forum supporting this many users with the good response times is a testimante to yours and the other administrators knowledge and skill.

ACW

Nautilus and/or Cyborg -- post up what forum the thread was in, and what its title was. Then I'll un-delete it, and remove Cyborg's unwanted post without the thread being deleted.

Nautilus

iTrader: (15)

Too late... I waited until brains fixed the time & then I reposted the thread... so we don't need the old one back. Cyborg was the first person to post so we only lost his reply... For reference.. it was called something like "Our new service truck..." and was in the eastern section... Thanks anyway

ACW

Ah, okay

(That is a big truck, btw! )