Update to the update: I’ve successfully re-imported all of the blog comments that were posted before this morning’s technical difficulties — 107,175 in all — into the “wp_comments” table in my blog’s MySQL database. (With today’s comments, we’re at 107,258 and counting — though that includes several thousand yet-to-be-deleted spams.) And so far, so good — the blog appears to be running at normal speed again. We’ll have to see if that continues, or if the problem recurs.

Next up, I intend to do what I was going to do last night, before this random crisis hit: upgrade from WordPress 1.5.2 to WordPress 2.1. Among other things, that should allow me to get this working, which means I should be able to create functional “categories” that are really a conglomeration of other categories, such as the long-awaited “non-sports” page. Stay tuned.

UCLAradio.com has a live webcast of the Trojan-Bruins game, which just tipped off. (Here are the direct URLs of the audio streams: QuickTime, Windows Media.)

UPDATE: Here’s the ESPN GameCast. USC leads, 22-13, with 8:59 left in the first half. Nice!

Listening to the game called by these UCLA announcers is driving me crazy, as they are saying absolutely nothing about how the Trojans are playing (it’s all about how the Bruins aren’t playing well, it’s a “very disappointing start” for the Bruins, etc.), and whenever USC makes a good play, they sound like they’ve just been told their cat died. Just now, the Trojans scored what must have been an electrifying basket, based on the clinical description they gave after-the-fact, but really, they barely called it at all as it was happening. I really cannot adequately express how bad these guys are as play-by-play announcers. But alas, I can’t find a USC broadcast that’s being streamed online. Harumph.

P.S. In other basketball news, North Carolina leads Duke 74-70 with 20.7 seconds left in a game that ESPN has somehow made me feel like I should care about, even though I really don’t. On the other hand, here’s something I do care about: Creighton and Southern Illinois both won tonight, setting up a battle for first place in the Missouri Valley Conference on Saturday in Carbondale. That game will be on ESPN2 at 6:05 PM.

UPDATE 2: Duke loses, 79-73. It’s the Blue Devils’ third consecutive loss, and their third home loss of the season. Okay, maybe I care about that a little bit, just because it allows me to say “Duke sucks.” :)

UPDATE 3: USC leads 30-29 at halftime. Fight on!

State senator Carl Kruger is planning to introduce legislation that would ban the use of iPods, cell phones, and other devices that might distract a user while crossing the street because of three recent deaths in New York city.

The Notre Dame women knock off #17 Louisville, 64-55, at the Joyce. The Cardinals fall to 21-3, and the bubblicious Irish get a marquee win. Nice! … The photo, of course, has nothing to do with any of that. It's a shot of Becca’s cat, Puck, that I took on Sunday. Aww.

Overheard at the law school: “Are you getting married at the Basilica and then having an after-party at the Backer?”

Love thee, Notre Dame.

NASA is revising its psychological screening of astronauts after one of them, Lisa Nowak, was charged with attempted murder. Visit CNN for the latest.

It is now possible to comment again, but all previous comments are currently unavailable.

More technical explanation: restoring my most recent backup failed to solve the problem, so now I’ve created a new, blank version of the “wp_comments” table, and it seems to be working fine. The old comments are still archived, they’re just currently inaccessible because they’re in the “wp_comments_old” table. I’m now guessing the structure of the table (as opposed to its data) was corrupted, so I’m going to try just importing the old data, without the structure. Stay tuned.

P.S. I don’t think my problems have anything to do with the global attack on the Internet.

UPDATE: Permalinks, archives, etc. are now fixed, too. As it turns out, that was actually an unrelated problem with my .htaccess file.

UPDATE, 4:13 PM: Okay, I just re-imported all 107,052 comments that were in the database as of 4:00 AM Tuesday. Let’s see what happens. If the blog manages to remain stable, then I’ll try to get yesterday’s comments back in there.

Three former Army Reserve officers and two civilians indicted with conspiracy, money laundering and bribery in probe of alleged fraudelent use of millions of U.S. dollars in Iraq. Visit CNN for the latest.

I have nowhere to watch USC stun UCLA at Pauley Pavillion tonight!! ARGH!!! I e-mailed the various Between the Buns locations to see if any of them get Fox Prime Ticket (formerly known as Fox Sports West 2), which is broadcasting the game. I realize it’s a West Coast channel, but c’mon, sports bars are supposed to have satellite packages where they get every sports channel known to man, right? Not here, apparently. Jeff Morauski, general manager of the South Bend location, wrote back:

We do not get that channel. I do not know of anyone who carries that package in this area. Sorry.

First we couldn’t watch the Sabres, and now we can’t watch the Trojans play the #2-ranked Bruins. LAME!!! The whole point of sports bars is the ability to watch games that you can’t get at home! South Bend sports bars officially suck.

Well anyway, regardless of all that… BEAT THE BRUINS!!! Tip is at 10:30 PM, and Pat Forde says we’re entering a whole new era of Trojan-Bruin basketball games:

The crosstown rivalry isn’t just for football anymore. Tim Floyd has the rebuilding job ahead of schedule at Troy — and that’s before O.J. Mayo arrives next season. With Arizona showing signs of sliding in the Pac-10 (17-12 the last season-and-a-half in league play), the Trojans could become the Bruins’ primary threat.

It starts tonight. BEAT THE BRUINS!!! Did I already say that?

P.S. And with comments offline due to technical difficulties, Mike Tran can’t even respond to this post! Muahaha! ;)

For some reason, the MySQL back-end of my blog is suddenly running very, very, very, very slow. I have no idea why, and I can’t seem to fix it. *sigh*

The homepage should load fine (because it’s actually a static HTML page that’s updated once a minute), but comments, permalinks, etc. may be effectively broken. I’ll try to fix it ASAP, but after several hours working on this problem, I’m really at a loss.

UPDATE: The problem seems to be isolated to the “wp_comments” table of the blog’s MySQL database. So I’ve temporarily renamed that table, thus breaking comments on the blog — but allowing the blog to function otherwise (aside from a bunch of ugly error messages). Now I just have to figure out what’s wrong with wp_comments, so I can restore it. In the mean time, however, comments are offline; I apologize for the inconvenience.

UPDATE 2: I’ve been going back and forth with WestHost tech support on this. Here is my latest message, which provides a pretty good summary of what I know (or think I know) at this point:

[T]his is NOT a simple efficiency issue. My site has long had some moderate performance issues due to the size of the database and the inefficiency of some of the WordPress queries, but this is of a whole different magnitude. It’s been basically offline all day (here’s my traffic chart) because MySQL is crippled. This happened very suddenly: everything was fine, and then last night around 9pm or 10pm, it all went to hell, for no apparent reason.

The problems appear to be isolated to the “wp_comments” table in the “wp” database. All the slow queries involved that table. I have renamed that table to “wp_comments_old,” thus effectively breaking comments on my blog — and now the blog is working fine, except of course for the error messages saying “Table ‘wp.wp_comments’ doesn’t exist” and the fact that comments don’t work. But the site is loading at normal speed (or a bit faster), and not crashing a few minutes after each VPS reboot, as it was before.

So, now the question is, what’s wrong with “wp_comments,” and how do we fix it? It’s a large table — over 100,000 rows — but that alone can’t be the culprit, because it was large yesterday too, and the day before, and the day before that, but it wasn’t crashing the site. It was a little bit slow, but not overwhelmingly so. As I said, this problem started very suddenly. So I suspect some form of data corruption or… I don’t know… what could cause a MySQL table to suddenly go from normal speed to slow as molasses? Any ideas?

I have to go to school, but when I get a chance (probably starting in 90 minutes or so), I’ll try to restore the most recent backed up version of wp_comments from before this problem started. Maybe that’ll fix things and perhaps shed light on the problem.

If anyone has any suggestions (including possible answers to the question “what could cause a MySQL table to suddenly go from normal speed to slow as molasses?”), please e-mail me at bloy [at] nd.edu. Thanks!

P.S. “After the jump” links also aren’t working, for some reason.

P.P.S. Er, I guess all permalinks, pages, etc. are broken too. So basically only the homepage is working. Gah.