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As many have noticed we had a few problems with the site yesterday. Thanks to everyone who emailed to let me know they were experiencing difficulties.
We think the problem has been solved, and that the site should be stable now.
For the record, events seem to have progressed something like this:
(As an aside, the search bot industry is to be commended on its inspiring reliance on recursion to construct request URLs. As soon as the authors learn how to either write a base case or use coinduction properly, we'll be all set, and bot-generated URLs will stop converging towards infinite length.)
...has a migration to PostgreSQL ever been contemplated?
MySQL is only being used for line-of-least-resistance reasons: because it's the default database for Drupal, as well as for various other systems being used on this server.
This means that switching to PG would have its own set of not-so-desirable consequences. For example, Drupal's code base apparently contains various "inherent mysqlisms" which favor MySQL over PG, among other issues.
The most significant concern is that maintenance of Drupal support for PG has been inconsistent, at best, and even actively opposed by some Drupal core developers. Similarly, contributed add-on modules don't always support PG, although that's supposed to have improved in more recent versions than the one LtU is running.
Here's a recent blog post with a comparison. Here's an older post which includes a brief description of the PG maintenance scenario.
Problems like the one that's just happened can probably be prevented with more proactive management, like better blocking of bad bots, and more aggressive deletion of anonymous sessions.
I was really only addressing MySQL's trashing of its index. I do hope that future versions of Drupal are more successful in supporting PostgreSQL. I hope even more fervently that blog posters of benchmarks between MySQL and PostgreSQL bother to learn how to do even minimal configuration of their OSes, PostgreSQL, and Drupal so that their benchmarks aren't trivially broken, but that's another subject altogether.
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