Some Erepublik internals exposed

Those of you who play Erepublik most likely know about the standard useless error message you get almost every day:

Although fun at the first time, this isn’t exactly exciting when you keep getting it 25% of the time. The dominant hypothesis about this recurring issue was a global site overload, but I could never see a clear proof of it. Well, today I finally got a real error message, in the form of a pretty detailed symfony exception report.
From this, we notably learn that:
– Erepublik runs in PHP 5.2.6 with Apache 2.2.9 on Debian Lenny, using MySQL.
– Erepublik uses the symphony framework, version 1.0.19 (NB: current stable version is 1.4.1…)
– their reCAPTCHA private key was: 6LfEGgIAAAAAAByJ6OCst1yen_O1TPe6vE4LtQ6t (I guess they should change it now…)
– they must have so frequent errors that they apparently didn’t configure symfony to e-mail them the errors (app_sfErrorNotifier_emailTo: error@mysite.com)
– they seem to have a memcache server at 10.100.5.16:11211
– the error does come from an overloaded database (too many connections)
See the complete error file for more details. All this isn’t really fascinating, but it helped me wait until the overload calmed down 🙂

Edit: bonus, the maintenance picture (rarer than the error one, although not exceptional) just popped up too. Here it is: