Last night we crossed over 16,777,216 comments in the database. The wise amongst you might note that this number is 2^24, or in MySQLese an unsigned mediumint. Unfortunately, like 5 years ago we changed our primary keys in the comment table to unsigned int (32 bits, or 4.1 billion) but neglected to change the index that handles parents. We’re awesome! Fixing is a simple ALTER TABLE statement… but on a table that is 16 million rows long, our system will take 3 hours to do it, during which time there can be no posting. So today, we’re disabling threading and will enable it again later tonight. Sorry for the inconvenience. We shall flog ourselves appropriately.
Slashdot | Slashdot Posting Bug Infuriates Haggard Admins
Funny and amazing at the same time. Funny that they missed that this may happen… when they where fixing other instances of it. And Amazing that there can be that much comment spam at Slashdot…
Tags: Interesting, Internet, Irony, Programming, Slashdot
Yeah, amazing indeed; both the missing and the spamming..
Thanks for helping