I don’t know if anyone has noticed but it has been a while. My website has been having some technical issues of late, and I have only just recently invested effort into fixing it. I think I may have succeeded this time, but it is coming at a terrible price.
The short story is that my database was taking up too much memory and crashing the system. I have tried a couple of times to fix it, but I haven’t had any luck until I tried getting help from ChatGPT. Let’s hope the fix holds. If it doesn’t, at least this time I will know who to blame.
I know, I know, bad boy. But I have tried and so far failed to fix this in every conventional way I know how. I have read about MariaDB tuning. I have adjusted the memory parameters of InnoDB, but so far nothing has worked.
I’ll be honest, I have no idea how database engines really work. Let alone how to optimally fine tune them for a 1GB of RAM VPS. In fact, I can say pretty confidently that if I hadn’t resorted to using AI, I probably would have been trying to attack this problem forever until I gave up and either shut down my site permanently or upgraded to a bigger VPS… and then hated myself for the cost increase.
There are alternatives of course. I could have gone with a free service like WordPress.com, But a lot of these services come with hidden costs. I can’t run my own plugins, and I can’t host extra sites off of the spare hardware that I have rented. I usually opt for the solution that gives me the most personal freedom. And a long time ago, this was it.
For all its problems, managing a VPS directly is a refreshingly straightforward cost benefit analysis. I paid directly for the hardware I use, so the providers don’t really care what I do with it ( as long as I don’t get them in trouble).
But the downside is… well, this. If the system crashes, nobody is going to come along and bring it up for me. If somebody breaches my database and defaces my site, I am solely responsible for what they do. If they steal my data, it’s all on me. With great power comes great responsibility indeed.
I am free, but at what cost? Chat GPT is rubbing my nose in a very hard lesson: I may not, in fact, have the technical competence to properly run a website. I told it my problem, waited a minute, and then watched in awe as it spit out a solution that appears to have worked.
This sounds like a win, right? I thought so too at first. But reading back over what it did, I still have no idea how any of it works. In the old days, if I actually had pursued this solution to completion myself, I might have figured out at least some of it. But The process of looking everything up, testing every configuration I found, and then implementing the correct one could have taken me years. And in the meantime, I would still have a crashing website! An AI model did all of this work already, and had a solution in the time it took to sip a coffee.
Knowing that I couldn’t have done all of this as quickly as I did without an AI model is making me wonder. is my digital freedom an illusion? If I had done it the old way, would I have truly understood anything?
I don’t know the answer to these questions, but I really don’t like where the conclusion is leading.
