# The Server is Busy at the moment....



## Eledhwen (Dec 27, 2003)

"The server is too busy at the moment, please try later."

Is it just me? I never got this message before this upgrade, now it happens quite frequently. Is it just too many users (scary!) or does it just have more to do generally?


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## ely (Dec 27, 2003)

It's not just you. But I don't know why it is so. Maybe it's because of all this upgrading business and when everything is done, it won't happen any more. At least I hope so...


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## Beorn (Dec 27, 2003)

Eledhwen said:


> "The server is too busy at the moment, please try later."
> 
> Is it just me? I never got this message before this upgrade, now it happens quite frequently. Is it just too many users (scary!) or does it just have more to do generally?





Beorn said:


> Well, there are approximately 88,000 more posts to go. Don't forget that's more than 2/3rds done. It's been going for somewhere around 48 hours now...so just have some more patience.
> 
> In an attempt to help speed it up, I'm going to reserve 20% more power on the forum for rebuilding for the night. I'll change it back to normal when I get up tomorrow morning...


This was from "It's Here" in News & Announcements. I'll try to explain it publicly since I've done it in a thousand IMs....

If you had a 400 page book, and you needed to find the phrase "Cultural diffusion" in it, you wouldn't search through every single word, looking for it? No, you'd go to the index. TTF's search works the same way. It would take hours to go through every single post searching for all the instances of 'Gandalf the White' on TTF. So, there's an index of sorts. It's basically a giant table. Each row in the table has a word, and a list of post id #s that contain that word. It takes about 1 second per post to build the index....if you check on the front page, you'll see we have somewhere around 300,000 posts. That's 300,000 seconds, or 5,000 minutes, or 83 hours....Rebuilding the search index is so processor intensive that we've reserved part of the computing power of the server (the computer that has TTF on it) simply to rebuilding. If WM ever lets it run completely, it'll finish eventually.....

You get 'The server is too busy' when too much power is being dedicated to browsing TTF, and the server wants to keep some more for rebuilding.


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