I hope this thing doesn't happen to FB with high concurrency, at least not
too tragically. First, a warning message was sent to the spamcop newsgroup:

"SpamCop Admin" <service@...> wrote in message
news:<hk0idv0f17tlfbn89p9nnfnvisovqmmkn5@...>...

> Julian is running a major database maintenance routine today.
>
> Things will be slow and you'll get all sorts of odd errors.
>
> As always, the immediate action drill is to shut down your browser and
> go lie on the couch. :-)
>
> - Don -

So, running a maintenance routine is enough to make MySQL inoperable?
Spamcop runs on MySQL. Would it be this problem the equivalent of running a
large query in FB-SS that monopolized engine power? Slow doesn't mean "kick
everybody" to me. Now, poor spamcop greets users with:

Cannot open database connection in getRow
HTTP/1.1 401 Authorization Required Date: Sun, 01 Jun 2003 06:44:52 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) mod_perl/1.27 WWW-Authenticate: Basic
realm="your SpamCop account" Connection: close Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 d3
401 - Authorization Required
Click Here0

How am I supposed to report a few f* spammers without doing all the
address/ISP digging myself manually?

Lesson learned: strive for high concurrency without compromsing consistency.

C.