Originally published at: LittleBITS: Why You Got Multiple Copies Last Week - TidBITS
My apologies to those who received multiple copies of last week’s TidBITS issue! As-yet-unexplained problems overwhelmed our server early in the initial send, causing it to reject all connections for 5 or 10 minutes. When it recovered, only 3,600 copies of the 23,427 total had been sent, and Sendy, our email distribution software, wasn’t automatically retrying as it’s supposed to. You can imagine my distress.
When our developer was able to take a look several hours later, he couldn’t see any reason for the problem, so we created a duplicate campaign in Sendy, added a short parenthetical in the issue blurb apologizing for the resend to those who had already received it, and resent.
Then I watched Sendy work through the sending process while keeping an eye on our server’s load average (a measure of how busy it is; it had been sky-high when connections were being rejected earlier). Although the load average went uncomfortably high while sending (up to 11, when it should ideally stay below 2 on a 2-core server), Sendy chugged through until it had sent 23,427 issues. I assumed it was done and went to bed.
Unfortunately, something else had gone wrong, and the server kept pushing out copies of the issue—shades of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”—so some people received as many as 10. By the time I got up in the morning, it had stopped, and everything seemed back to normal, apart from all the reader messages alerting me to the problem. As much as I appreciate the effort, rest assured that someone else will undoubtedly have notified us. If you notice something weird like this in the future, check TidBITS Talk to see if I’ve commented on it yet.
Throughout the rest of the week, our smaller email distributions—articles sent to TidBITS members and the Japanese and Dutch translations—went out correctly, except for one Watchlist item that’s still trying to send to the last 61 users after three days. I just restarted the server to see if that helps.
I hope this issue sends properly, with everyone receiving just a single copy, but if not, you’ll know the gremlin plaguing the server is still up to its mischief. Just delete any extras.
