Some of you may have noticed by now that this site is quite often down. I just wanted to give a brief explanation for this. This site certainly could be more robust, but, at least for the moment, I'm running a development instance of hunchentoot on one of the generally less-well supported SBCL platforms, FreeBSD, and am using things like my hunchentoot-cgi interface and nuclblog which certainly haven't been well tested, and probably aren't used by anyone else either. All this adds up to a lot of moving parts that occasionally fail in less-than-graceful ways.

In fact, just today the site crashed because SBCL ended up in LDB. I try to avoid this and try to reset the thing soon after this happens, but occasionally a good chunk of time passes. Until recently, I was seeing very frequent failures in which SBCL would run out of processes and the server would die. It turns out this was caused by hunchentoot-cgi and the way it was calling sb-ext:run-process. By calling sb-ext:run-process with :wait nil, the problem seemed to go away and all was right with the world for a couple of weeks. I'm not sure what's up with the latest failure and will keep on eye things to hopefully minimized the downtime if the server ends up back in LDB again.

Why am I using hunchentoot-cgi, you ask? Well, that seemed like the easiest way to use gitweb on my current setup. Hopefully it won't cause to many other problems. Thanks for your patience to this of you who actually might want to access the site.