Slashdot hits Tilt! Game over.
Slashdot found the end of the internet. At some point last night, some joker posted the 16,777,216th comment on Slashdot and things ground to a halt. You’ll note that 16,777,216 is 2 to the 24th power, which significantly happens to be the size of an unsigned medium integer in MySQL. Five years ago, CmdrTaco and his crew of Slashdotians set the keys on their comments database to 32 bit, allowing for 4.1 billion entries. They forgot to upgrade one of the keys, and it was left at 24 bit precision. Well, that limit was reached.
To rectify the situation, they took the database down for three hours or so to run an ALTER TABLE statement, which had to iterate over the 16 million rows of the table. Sounds like everything turned out okay, and Slashdot is back in action. Way to save the day, CmdrTaco!
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