This morning I was going to post about some really neat stuff at Thinkgeek (I thought of my dad, Wallace, Woody, Kevin, and Brian when I saw the stuff. I’ll give you 2 gueses what it relates to. 🙂 ) so I came to the website to login. What did I see? Not my normal screen….nope, I saw this:
Arg! What’s the matter?! I was worried something really happened to the site (no, I don’t have a backup I do now). I had been logged into my hosting providers admin panel a few days ago and noticed I was over my db limit. I wondered if they did any sort of checking, but everything had been working fine so I decided to leave it be. Well, I guess they do check it because I had been denied write access to my database. Here is what I saw in the usage stats:
Arg. I was over and needed to fix it. I figured it was the bsq_sitestats module I had installed because I had a bazillion stats stored. But, I couldn’t just use the module to clean out the stuff because I couldn’t login. Well, I’m offered phpmyadmin access to my database so I logged in there. Sure enough, the stats module was eating up all of my space (plus some):
Sure enough, the bsu_hit table was taking up my quota + some. And another table was taking up another 24MB! Wow! How to get rid of the data? My first thought was to just clean out stats for things like the googlebot, etc…. Well, I tried that, but couldn’t remember the syntax for the delete command. I know, I could have looked it up, but…..
I wasn’t sure what would happen and how unreliable my stats would be if I just did that. So, I decided to start from scratch. I truncated the tables. Truncate, for those who don’t know, is kinda like a delete…but kinda not. It gets rid of the data only it is very fast (on Oracle, if I remember right you cannot rollback a truncate command…that is part of the reason. On mysql, I’m not so sure).
So i truncate everything, go back to the admin page. Refresh it. No change in the space I’m using. ARG. Try to refresh the website. ARG. Same error:
ARG. I call my hosting company and talk to a guy. he has an American name, but he isn’t an American. Probabaly Indian…but speaks english very well. I explain the problem, he goes off and checks. Tells me I need to wait 15-30 min for their systems to refresh. But he’s more than happy to walk me through getting rid of data as the admin tool says I still have -50MB free. Arg. I try to explain the situation to him…he’s just following the script. In the end, I tell him that I can’t delete anything more and I’ll wait. So, I’m chekaming (чекам means I wait in Serbian. This is my Englishized version of that word). I finally check back and everything works. YAY!
But take a look at the space usage after:
I went from using > 150 MB to < 10. Gee wizz. The bsq_sitestats plugin sure is nice…but it uses space. To be fair, I’ve never done any optimization or scrubbing of my stats (I’ll do that now) so I don’t want to misrepresent the app. The stats are nice, but it eats up the space.
So, now you know the story of the error. I’m sorry for everyone who had issues overnight. You won’t get a seperate post about the thinkgeek stuff. Follow the links on top.