The system logs show sometimes a lot of database errors. Most boil down to the same thing, viz. users trying to use 4-byte emoji's. Apparently, the MySQL implementation we are using cannot comfortably swallow these special byte sequences.
Another, usually less frequent cause, is external hacking attempts. Mostly these cause the NG server to be responding slowly, partly because the error logs fill up.
A quote from another web site facing similar issues,
Workaround is easy: do not use "emoji" characters.
Fix is very non-trivial, as it requires modifications to the database to
handle four-byte extended Unicode characters, which it doesn't by
default. Three bytes is plenty of every written language in the whole
world, and no-one thought we'd ever need four bytes until Apple picked
up the Japanese craze for emojis!The last statement reminds me of the infamous "640K is enough" quotation ascribed to Bill Gates. See
https://www.computerworld.com/article/1563853/the-640k-quote-won-t-go-away-but-did-gates-really-say-it.html
