Wikia Search, the Web search engine from Wikia, Inc. has been having recurring problems with their website since 2 p.m. EST on Monday (December 1).

One third of the requests to the website result in a HTTP 503 server error message (service unavailable). See screenshot below.

Since the problems started on Monday, the website has been unavailable for a total of more than 14 hours. The graphs below show the hourly average uptime percentage for the Wikia Search website.

Here is one for the last 36 hours, showing an hourly uptime hovering around 65%.

When looking at the last seven days, it’s easy to see when the problems started, and that they started after a longer period of stability.

Even when the Wikia Search website loads, it doesn’t always load correctly. We tried reloading their web page manually several times, with varied results. Sometimes it loaded fine, sometimes it seems like style sheets weren’t loaded, etc.

With almost two days with this problem, hopefully Wikia is on their way to finding a solution to whatever problem it is that they are having with Wikia Search.

The data above comes from the Pingdom uptime monitoring service.

UPDATE:
The Wikia Search website started working properly again after 2 p.m. EST on December 3. The total accumulated downtime for this incident ended up being 16 hours.

Google’s App Engine suffered from increased data access latency and errors yesterday, including problems serving applications. According to TechCrunch, the problems lasted for approximately six hours.

From the App Engine status page:

On July 2nd, all applications experienced increased error rate and latency with read and write Datastore and memcache operations, as well as some serving errors. Datastore access and serving have been fully restored as of 12:25 PM PDT.

What happened yesterday exposed a couple of interesting weaknesses for App Engine.

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We have exciting news to share. As you may have noticed, we made some changes to the Pingdom website yesterday, and the main thing we added was a new account type that many of you are going to love: Pingdom Free.

Now, for the first time ever, you can use Pingdom for free. We’re not talking about a free trial, but a completely free account that you can use for as long as you like, no strings attached.

In other words, you are getting a professional uptime monitoring service for free. With the Pingdom service, you’ll be the first to know when your site goes down.

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If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ll know that we love everything geeky, and we have often put together themed galleries that appeal to tech geeks like ourselves.

Here is a collection of some of the geekiest galleries that have come and gone on this blog.

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Wordpress.com, the popular blogging service from Automattic, has some interesting growth statistics posted on its website. Among other things, there is a graph showing how many new blogs are created on the service each day.

Based on the graphs that Automattic provides us with, it’s actually not that difficult to estimate how much Wordpress.com will grow in 2009. Which, of course, was a temptation we couldn’t resist!

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Operating systems on supercomputers used to be custom-made affairs, but this has changed. These days, Linux has become a popular choice for supercomputers. But how popular? You may be surprised.

Top500.org maintains a list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. A new list was published yesterday (it happens twice a year), so we took the opportunity to go through the list and find out what OS the top 20 supercomputers are using.

It took some work, but the results are interesting.

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