Cars and Coffee v.3.20 *We're Back!*

[SVT2888]

After last weeks fiasco with the series of server crashes, CNCpics is back online. We have made many changes. Our goal as always is just to provide good coverage of different automotive events we get to go to that various automotive enthusiast around the world only with they could attend on a regular basis. We are trying new stuff out, feel free to comment on our new direction.

All the pics are click-able thumbnails





















































As always you can enjoy the full collection at CNCpics.com

Thanks,

-Leo

[SVT2888]

Originally Posted by Max

The story behind the great crash !

As you no doubt noticed, cncpics.com crashed fairly hard minutes after last weeks picture posting, this week we have a shiny new server on a shiny new connection and also a number of changes to our 'model'. The reasons for the crash are cumulative, the software that backs the site creates a series of temporary files during the creating and serving of the resized and watermarked images that you enjoy every week. We have simply uploaded large (4-8MB) images and the software has resized, watermarked and handled the caching. This is fairly server intensive and also takes a lot of disk space. So much so that the cache growth caused the hosting company concerns in the past and a weekly 'cron' routine was written to clear down the cache. That routine failed on Feb 5th and then on feb 12th, 19th, 26th etc continued to fail as it had too much work to do in the alloted processor time.

Which brings us around to Tuesday morning, the hosting company noticed that there was an excessive number of cache files and disabled writing to the cache folder. Just as everyone was trying to look at the pics. As the software could not use the temp and cache files it wrote 16K files to the hosting root and the hosting company pulled the plug. The catch22 was that they would not re-enable it until I had fixed it and they would not give me access to fix it unless I had fixed it. After several abortive attempts and a lot of swearing we moved to a temporary host. This too caved in trying to resize the (large) files and at that point a new (vps) host came on line and we are now moved over entirely.

With the new host comes many new things.

1) Free wallpapers - up to 1600 (or more in some case) rather than any attempts at commerce.

2) Smaller upload file limits - no file over 1.4MB (and 1920x1920) can be uploaded. PERIOD.

3) Single resize + 'original' image availability only if someone really wants the original (4-8MB) they can contact us and ask for it.

This has multiple effects - it reduces the physical storage requirements from 92GB to a mere 18GB as of today, plus it vastly improves the performance.

The only thing that remains the same is the url - cncpics.com

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