it's Y2K, no, it's 32 bit unix time, no, it's slashdot!

[Gadi Evron <ge () linuxbox org>]

http://slashdot.org/articles/06/11/09/1534204.shtml

"2^24 comments ought to be enough for anyone" -- CmdrTaco

Slashdot Posting Bug Infuriates Haggard Admins 
Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday November 09, @10:45AM
 from the this-is-never-good dept. 
 Slashdot.org 
 Last night we crossed over 16,777,216 comments in the database. The wise
amongst you might note that this number is 2^24, or in MySQLese an
unsigned mediumint. Unfortunately, like 5 years ago we changed our primary
keys in the comment table to unsigned int (32 bits, or 4.1 billion) but
neglected to change the index that handles parents. We're awesome! Fixing
is a simple ALTER TABLE statement... but on a table that is 16 million
rows long, our system will take 3+ hours to do it, during which time there
can be no posting. So today, we're disabling threading and will enable it
again later tonight. Sorry for the inconvenience. We shall flog ourselves
appropriately.

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