One of my client’s servers I have been working on had started to suffer constant drop outs. What normally loads up in a flash now just .. doesn’t. Whilst static pages loaded fine, albeit slower than usual, most PHP pages seemed to just time out. More specifically, the pages that needed to access the database were failing…
Now, experience points that to some large dodgy query or two (or a lot of them) causing issues. Anyway, to cut to the chase, I find out one particular site’s database has 15 locked tables, with the process list showing queries into phpbb_ tables… hmm
I wish I took a screenshot of the forum before I nuked the directory and the related database tables, which incidently was a rather old PHPBB board, heavily spammed with thousands of pages of topics with all your usual penis enl4rg3ment sexy girl cam wording. The mysql process list query reveals many search indexing queries (thanks to the spambots) – the tables responsible for searches alone are at least a gigabyte in size! No wonder why the server decided to jam up and play dead, whilst spam bots play ping pong guitar with this mouldy growth of a rotten board…
Moral of this story? Prune your garden, or expect large weeds to appear!
(incidently, I’ve seen what looked like a mini-garden forest on someone’s plate of what looks like months-old of baked beans. Such fuzzy greenness. In a student house.)