In recent days I’ve been digging into some problems on my websites, especially HistoryReviewed where I have a serious problem. I’ve had a number of outages on HistoryReviewed in recent weeks where the database has been going down for an unknown reason. One day the website was down for almost a whole day! Yikes!

I’ve been trying to get to the root of the problem as well as trying to see if some performance tuning won’t help reduce the load on my server. The bad news is that I’ve still not got to the root of the problem. I have however implemented a Plan B to try to reduce the outages on HistoryReviewed.

In the process I dug quite a bit into seeing if I could speed up my websites. I made a number of changes to both HistoryReviewed and AfricanCrisis, and the websites should be quite a bit faster than they were before.

If you experienced weirdness on HistoryReviewed in the past few days, especially today, it was me fiddling behind the scenes, starting and stopping things and rebooting the server.

I’m monitoring things, and let’s see if things will run more smoothly. Jan