Since last night the server has been acting up, and I couldn’t do anything with it thanks to Batelco’s screwups as well. Finally it seems that Batelco’s problems (this time) are over and the internet is functioning normally again.
I had a chance to do something about the server today, you might have noticed several periods of outages, that was due to server misconfigurations (I screwed it up that is!) so I called in the experts at the UK office of RackSpace. Thanks to James Lamb, he spotted that I was running a very dated Linux Kernel which also contributed to the problem in that it had a bug that screws up the ethernet card on the machine, so that if it gets busy, it flumoxes (technical term:)) the server and only a reboot will get it back to normal for a short while (about a week or so). James upgraded the Kernel to a later version and it already seems to be running faster!
He also noticed that I have been too generous in giving far too much memory to the MySQL database processes so that if it does get busy with a lot of database requests, it forces the machine to swap very quickly and hence saturates the machine and slows the whole thing down. He has fixed this problem too.
So, sorry folks for the problems, but they are fixed now.
