Chernobyl Takes Down Our Server

You may notice Phoronix taking a really long time to load this morning or the pages even timing out. This is because of the Chernobyl photographs that were posted yesterday and they are now on SlashDot.

We've handled the load from being "Slashdotted" (and Digg, Reddit, etc) dozens of times and our main server hasn't fallen in years because of it, but this time it has. Due to the 130 images of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, the Zone of Alienation, Pripyat, Chernobyl town, Red Forest, etc, this has become rather taxing on the server. All of the images are dynamically watermarked and also scaled via the GD library in real-time depending upon your screen resolution. All of this load is what's quickly eating up the server.

Hopefully within a few hours all server operations will return to normal. Again, sorry about any problems with reading your morning dose of Phoronix. If you are interested in those pictures from Chernobyl but are unable to get the page to load, check back later or bookmark the Chernobyl article for easy visiting later.