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technoob yes, I disabled it globally because I suspected that it might be causing problems, since I saw some error logs related to it in PHP-FPM when I attempted to upgrade. I now see that it happened because the new version requires Flarum 1.4.0, which FreeFlarum is not on, yet. It should be safe to turn it on now, since I rolled back the extension upgrade.

FreeFlarum now has a dedicated status page and Twitter! Currently, it monitors the health of FreeFlarum globally (e. g.: if backups are being created, server load, etc...) and our Skeleton PHP forum. I will post important status notifications at Twitter, and provide a more detailed description of the incident here. This will make sure that you (and your users) are notified of any downtime as soon as I find out about it.

Let's test it out and see how it looks like:

oontsa yes, I can confirm that FreeFlarum was experiencing some MariaDB related issues this morning.

After lots of debugging, I was able to find out the culprit. It turns out that there could've been a larger amounts of requests made to fetch the forum directory on the main FreeFlarum website. As a result, I've made the quick decision to remove the forum directory altogether. I can't confirm whether this was a DDoS attack, but it's unlikely since the logs didn't indicate so.

The directory was a neat little feature made by me. However, I made it when my experience with Python wasn't as great as it is now - this means that the database queries weren't so optimized on the server-side. Plus, not many people were actually using it (and the audience just wasn't there either). Perhaps I will bring it back as a separate project, but that's unlikely since there already exist sites such as BuiltWithFlarum.com.

On the bright side, I've been able to optimize the MariaDB configuration, to allow for more simultaneous connections. The difference should be felt especially on larger forums (+1,000) posts. For example: a forum with +30,000 posts (wait, we have forums that are this big?) will now load in under 1.5 seconds on average, assuming that the server is not overloaded and not many extensions are enabled (I am not sure what were the numbers before, but this might possibly be a significant improvement).

As always, if your forum encounters any issue, please let me know. FreeFlarum does not monitor every single forum, and so it is not aware if an individual error happens. In case of a global issue (like this, where MariaDB crashed), I am notified immediately thanks to our new status monitor - but just message me anyways, to make sure.

Fixed and resolved