As Steve mentioned, 8052.com was pretty much toast--as best as I can tell for the last 16 hours or so.

It's still not exactly clear what caused the problem, but our server load went off the chart. Not bandwidth, mind you, but the CPU doing *something* so intensely that it literally had no time for anything else. To put it in perspective, we usually run at a load of 0.30. The server was at 106 when I had it rebooted this afternoon.

Unfortunately, the server picked a heck of a moment to act up. I left yesterday morning for a weekend "vacation" (if you can call shopping a vacation) and wasn't able to login all of Thursday. When I logged in this morning I discovered our server was inaccessible and it took 3 hours to finally get someone at our hosting provider to simply reset the server. I suspect we'll be switching hosting providers before too long since a 3-hour response time is unacceptable.

In any case, I just spent the last few minutes writing a script that will monitor server load and will automatically reboot the server if it exceeds a certain threshold. So hopefully this problem won't happen again.

Regards,
Craig Steiner
8052.com Webmaster

PS--On the upside, it gave me an excuse to "stay home" to get it fixed rather than going out with my wife and friends shopping. I hate shopping... but I do hate server downtime even more.