As you all well know, the entire internet TWG broke this morning.  The problem was the ratings system, it was breaking everything.  Also, the watermarking was causing a problem.  Also, the hotlinking was causing slowdowns.  While they were all off one their own machines, those things didn’t cause much problems, but now that it’s just one dedicated machine…well, let’s just say that I didn’t purchase the ultra awesome hosting package, I got the budget package that came with budget RAM on a budget CPU.  Leading to some ugly ‘500 internal error’ messages until I fixed a couple things.

Items removed to try to reduce server over head:

Buy Me A Beer – no one was buying me beer, I had to buy my own.

Link to my site – really?  if you don’t know how to send a url you are internet retarded, which is worse than real world retarded.  I’m not really too sure why I even installed this piece of code, other then I was bored/drunk.

Ratings – I’ll try to see what I can do to bring this back, but the ratings were raping the mysql server.  I’ll try to talk the ratings dev guy to enable caching for this.

Hotlinking Images – had to turn this off.  I originally thought I used about 10% of my monthly bandwidth in a single day, but I was wrong, I only used about 3%, but you can see where that might be a problem when 3% x 30 = 90% only giving me a 10% budget for overages.  With the way that diggs/reddits/slashdots/boingboing/farks/stumbleupon spikes happen, I’d rather have a larger buffer between me and an extra $2,000 worth of bandwith.

tl;dr = removed features to fix MCS, some might come back, some won’t.