Sorry about the intermittent downtime
You probably may not have noticed as these were very short and far between, but if you were affected then sincere apologies! We think we’ve fixed the problem and it shouldn’t happen again. Geek talk follows.
We goofed up a bit, here’s how – When we recently had to reinstall our OS on the production server, we somehow managed to switch our Debian apt-get repositories from etch to sid (the unstable version). And guess what.. we unknowingly installed a bunch of unstable libraries, ImageMagick included. And we suspect that the latest ImageMagick (from the unstable branch) has been crashing when trying to apply an unsharp mask to very large images. We use JMagick to connect to ImageMagick, which we realize may not be the brightest of ideas, because if ImageMagick seg-faults, it takes down the JVM with it :(. Have reverted to the stable versions now.. so hopefully things will be normal. I think we’ll have to start work on an alternate solution to get rid of JMagick.
2 comments July 5th, 2008