Expected DU downtime for maintenance: Thursday March 20, 2 PM ET (UPGRADE COMPLETE, UPDATED THURSDAY 4 PM ET)

[EarlG]

This discussion thread was locked by EarlG (a host of the Announcements group).

Update, Thursday 4 PM ET:

The server upgrade has been completed and everything is looking good so far. A few notes:

First, we are very hopeful that this will alleviate the 504 problem we've been having lately, but there's still a chance that the problem may occur. If it does, we'll have to continue work on other solutions.

Second, we only upgraded our front end servers today, which should significantly improve performance. However, we also need to upgrade our database server, which we will do sometime in the next few weeks. I'll post another announcement when we're getting ready to do that.

Aside from that, any time we perform an upgrade there's a chance that something may glitch out. If you notice any weirdness over the next few days, just send me a PM to let me know.

Thanks again for your patience!

EG


Original message:

Hello all,

As you are probably aware, we've been having some issues keeping the site online recently, and we have had to periodically restrict traffic by flipping DU to "Members Only Mode," during which only people who have a DU account and are signed in can read the site.

This sort of thing can be caused by any number of factors, so unfortunately it's taken us a while to get to the bottom of it, because we had to eliminate a variety of possibilities. However, we think we may have a handle on the situation now. Essentially, we've gained traffic over the last few months, and we think our current hardware setup is not robust enough to handle the current load. Or as Elad explained it to me:



We believe that simply upgrading our setup should resolve the situation, so we will be going offline for a little while on Thursday afternoon to perform this upgrade. Expected time for maintenance is one hour, although if everything goes well it could be a short as 30 minutes.

In case you are wondering why we don't do this in the middle of the night, the simple answer is that if something goes wrong, it's usually quicker and easier to deal with tech support during the daytime.

That's all for now -- once again, the site will be offline on Thursday March 20 at 2pm ET for (hopefully) somewhere between 30 minutes and one hour, assuming all goes well. I'll post again once the upgrade is complete.

Thanks for your patience while we attempt to resolve this ongoing issue.

EarlG