Downtime, fixed (wp-cache and dreamhost)
Apologies for the downtime, if anyone noticed. Short explanation (i.e., geekery) follows.
My hosting service Dreamhost puts several users on a single machine. That means if someone uses up lots of cpu resources with a hungry process, the others suffer. So Dreamhost monitors processes and kills the ones that seem to be making trouble.
I’d read lots of folk saying that a WordPress blog can be resource-hungry, and that it’s smart to install a caching plugin to slim things down a bit. Wp-cache gets a lot of good press, so I installed it.
Unfortunately it has a bug. So the caching module that I set up to ensure that Dreamhost wouldn’t need to clobber my processes… made Dreamhost clobber my processes. Sigh.
Probably I don’t need caching anyway. Please don’t slashdot this post.