Comixpedia WANGED

Just a quick note that our host took us down for an hour for unspecified MySQL load issues – we’re still at risk of being taken down again until I can sort out what the problem is/was. But whatever it is we’ll get it sorted out soon.

UPDATE: Our current host couldn’t handle a link from PA. We’re back up so long as we don’t get insanely popular again… 🙂

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Xaviar Xerexes

Wandering webcomic ronin. Created Comixpedia (2002-2005) and ComixTalk (2006-2012; 2016-?). Made a lot of unfinished comics and novels.

26 Comments

  1. That was my assumption, but evidently not the case.

    Which is a pity, since I really wanted to be able to say that Comixpedia got wanged. 😀

  2. Aw man! I was so happy for you guys. Next-time someone asks you if you got Wanged, you say YES!!!

  3. Sad but true…

    We had survived a past wanging, boingboinging and slashdotting so I’m not sure why this was so devasting.

  4. Man, I had figured it was wangage but that’s not the case.

    Still. William G getting some wang tossed his way, Alexander Danner getting a little wang the week before.

    I need to work on being more artsy and pretentious and authoritative too so I can stop getting my ass handed to me in comic-monkey knife-fights. Am I gonna have to break out the black turtlenecks and replace my specs with a monacle before I raise the ire of Mike Krahulik? I’ll need two monacles, of course, because I have two bad eyes, but that should serve to make me even more pretentious… right?

    I just can’t catch a break. Clearly it’s a case of my work being too heavy on the fartsy and too light on the artsy. I’m going to have to start speaking all the time with the fake eurotrash accent I currently reserve exclusively for saying “Diesel Sweeties”. Seriously, try saying “Diesel Sweeties” with a fake eurotrash accent, next to masturbation it is the most god damned fun you can have alone with only your own body to amuse you. Someone needs to create a website whose content is nothing other than different webcomic artists saying “Diesel Sweeties” with fake eurotrash accents. I may not know art but by golly I do know fun.

  5. Oh hey! It was wangage! Congratulations. In 9 months Comixpedia will give birth to a GBA.

  6. Gabe’s been taking /3gal h3rba/ svpp/!m3nts, it’s made the wangage more devastating, pleasing to the ladies.

    I hear he’s refinanced his mortgage too.

  7. Somebody musta told him my host gave me a terrabyte of monthly bandwidth for Christmas…

  8. I don’t know, man, I think Apophenia 357 is way heavier on the “artsy” than the goofy comic I got called out for. I think maybe you just need to work more variations of the word “interpretation” into your description, and you’ll be all set. For instance, a subtitle like “An Interpretive Experiment,” would be both accurate and sure to raise the occasional hackle. It’s all in the phrasing!

  9. A little transcending would probably help me too. “An Interpretive Experiment That Transcends… the… stuff”

    Shit… see this is where a degree in the fine arts would have really paid off. I clearly wasted too much time drinking beer and blowing shit up in my youth. Or… or maybe I was ironically drinking beer and making 105mm Howitzer art? Yes yes… this could work.

  10. Never really been into the “transcending,” myself. Sleep deprivation is more my drug of choice.

  11. Click Here to see if you can identify when the last time the Webcomics Examiner got linked by Penny-Arcade was.

  12. Observe now as the other members of the tribe are whipped into a frenzy by the presentation of the alpha male’s massive wang.

    [/David Attenborough]

  13. Hey, I just found out about our comic-monkey knife-fight! I responded on your LJ, but short-form: I’m rooting for you.

  14. So just how much bandwidth DOES a “wanging” pull from a site, anyway?

    Is it more than a terabyte? How much more, if so? Does anyone know?

  15. When sites go down because of links from big, popular sources, it’s often not *bandwidth* that is the issue, but *processor usage* on the server itself. Database driven websites like Comixpedia are much more vulnerable to outages-from-popularity.

    Correct me if I’m wrong, Xerexes, but the other times you were “wanged” and “slashdotted” and whatever, you were not using PostNuke the same way you’re using it now, post-new-design. You’ve mentioned hand-coding some new PostNuke modules in another thread — I’m guessing that those new modules may not be making the most efficient SQL queries in the world; I’ve run into this problem myself with my own handcrafted code. SQL’s deceptively easy at first, but to get complex data in an efficient manner is mind-numbingly difficult.

    If the database is cranking through too much data, or doing so in an inefficient way, and it suddenly has to handle ten, twenty, or a hundred times the number of queries that it was handling before, that would put the kind of load on a server processor that causes hosting resellers to shut down accounts temporarily.

    Once you’ve graduated up to the point where you’re renting whole servers, from the same people the resellers rent them from, this problem can be less fierce (though it’s still a problem) because you yourself, and not your hosting reseller, who gets to decide how to deal with the problem.

    But, yeah, bandwidth: numerous white-hot gigs can be, um, shot, in the course of a single wanging. Depends on how many images you’ve got on your pages and how big they are, and how interesting the link looks to the typical Penny-Arcade reader. For example, the last time P-A linked to the Examiner, it was in a prominent and positive way — and the traffic spike is huge, as you see on Alexa. This time, not so much.

    It’s worth it, though. Even less-than-positive links from P-A can lead to longterm, appreciative readers (Alexander’s Panel One has never dropped down to its pre-wanging levels of popularity on WCN, even though the link was not completely complimentary).

    Joey
    http://www.webcomicsnation.com

  16. I used 6 gigabytes of transfer on Wednesday….Considering I have a thousand gigs, it’d take a lot more than that to take my site down. Even before the upgrade, I had 120gigs/ month, so this doesnt hurt me. Like a highschool sweetheart, I’m laughing at the wang.

    (To put it into persepctive though, this is because my entire site was read by the new visitors. I doubt I would have used up that much if I only had the one page to show.)

    Anything with a smaller service might face problems. But really, my original 120gig/mo hosting package wasn’t all that unusual these days. I’m kinda shocked Comixpedia went down.

  17. When sites go down because of links from big, popular sources, it’s often not *bandwidth* that is the issue, but *processor usage* on the server itself. Database driven websites like Comixpedia are much more vulnerable to outages-from-popularity.

    Ah, that makes sense. Joey has the knowing of many things.

  18. That’s why I need help becoming more artsy and pretentious like, so I can get me some of that Penny Arcade wang. And by golly, I figure if there’s anyone here who could give me useful advice on getting wang… well…. ~_^

  19. That’s assuredly it – we were overwhelming a shared MySQL machine is what I was told – although it was a bit suprising since the link was directly to Kelly’s article and I did minimal tinkering with that module really. Which may suggest I’ve got something slightly screwy or that the original module itself (it’s based on Sections which is untouched from original PHPNUKE days I believe) isn’t as robust as it could be.

    It’s hard to simulate “PA link” conditions when you’re testing though!

  20. Joey’s right – it was entirely the load on the database. Which is an issue to solve although not one I know the answer to off the top of my head. Unlike Joey I have a day job that keeps me busy and that I need to pay the bills so coding on Comixpedia won’t get a lot of time this year (much less then last year anyhow).

    In any event I got Gabe to shift the link to someone else – I think it was the Examiner? – so more traffic all around…

  21. Your highschool sweetheart laughed at your wang? Oh man… that’s cold, dude. Cold!

    Wang should never be laughed at.

  22. Hey, I didnt say “My highschool sweetheart”

    And I tend to get gasps of amazement…. So, nyah!

  23. I say “Screw the Eisner Awards” we should settle this whole comics thing once and for all by everyone laying it out on the table and see who measures up.

    Will Penny Arcade still have the famous wang at the end of the day? Well, we’ll never know until we do it.

    I mean the measuring… I have no intention of doing Gabe and Tycho’s wangs.

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