Wha' hoppen???

[gristgal]

Around 10pm ET, the site went fluky, and my blog was unavailable. I'm somewhat grateful for the "unavailable" notice that went up a little while later - at least anybody that was trying to get in after that went up didn't think the site died, but this is really not the kind of thing I'm accustomed to from Blog Harbor.

Do you know what went wrong? If so, is it related to the reason(s) for all the maintenance/upgrades lately?

Thanks,
gristgal
_________________
"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance."
Confucius

[john]

Looks like there were some issues related to our internal network ealier, our team is looking into what might have been the cause.

[gristgal]

Thanks. The timing last night could hardly have been worse. That's a busy time of the evening, but last night it went way down - it could hardly help doing so. Mid- to late-evening is normally one of my two highest activity times of day.

For all I know, I'm the only one that's curious, but could you give us some detail about all the maintenance and upgrades lately? I'd like to give an explanation of some sort in my post telling readers about the Saturday maintenance. It's surprising how many people read my maintenance posts. I'm not hinting for apologies; I know you'd never have an outage, if you had a choice in the matter.

We're used to having maintenance outages every couple months, not just about every week. It's getting more than a little bit frustrating, especially considering that I've got this weekly update thing that I try to get up on Saturdays, that always requires a good bit of web searching. Meeting your deadline is even harder than meeting mine, given I'm a nightowl. But that's my problem, not yours.

And then there are the stats. Apparently we've lost the web server logs for the 11th? That's not the first time, unfortunately, but the last time it happened was in June (last spring was pretty tough, stats-wise). The seldom-er, the good-er, please? We've gotten used to things going smooooothly. And bragging about our wonderful host.

Will this week's maintenance/update be "it" for a while? Or are we looking at more of them? When you have those deals where you have two sessions, two weeks apart, it's frustrating, but at least I know what's coming. I've noticed that we're also getting less advance notice of them.

My mind likes its well-worn ruts, and so does my stomach. When things start going weird, I start getting heartburn. Given I'm already on Nexium, and my doctor has given me a prescription for a second pill (freaked me out; I've never heard of taking two different ones), I'm looking for calm, peaceful, no surprises, and all that good stuff. Pretty please with s/u/g/a/r/ Maalox on it?

[gristgal]

Ooooops! I just looked at my mail, and found that John had come through with a log file for the 11th.

My apologies, John. You've proved once again how hard you guys work.

gristgal

[john]

The best explanation I can give you is that we're simply trying to provide you with a better service.

We've done maintenance on our network recently, and that allows us to move bits and bytes into and out of and around our network more efficiently. Meaning we can accept more requests for blog pages, and serve them to your visitors. And it means the connections between the servers are faster inside our network so we can add more hardware to handle those requests.

We've also done maintenance on our hardware, specifically the database servers so that we can handle more capacity more efficiently. We've changed some of the architecture of these database systems so that the system can scale to more users.

And on Saturday we're adding some features, so we need to take the system offline in order to do a full backup, upgrade the software, revise the database structure to handle the new features, test the results, and bring the system back online.

Yes, you are correct in that we've been doing some serious work on the system lately. That's not a bad thing and does not mean that there's something wrong. It just means we're working hard at making a good thing even better.

And by the way, I sent you your log files about 4 hours before you wrote your post here.

[gristgal]

Will this be the last for a while?

(hope, hope)

It's gotten really annoying, and I'm afraid some readers are going to start thinking this isn't such a wonderful host, given how often my blog is down. Most of my readers aren't daily visitors. They're more like weekly visitors.

Think how this looks to the ones who do it on Saturday evening. Your scheduling is wonderful for bloggers in Europe, but not very much fun for people in North America. I dare say it's much worse yet for those in Australia - and you seem to have a lot of bloggers in Oz. Have you given any thought to the distribution - and numbers - of your clients, when setting up your schedules?

gristgal

[john]

Will this be the last for a while?

About the only way I can ever answer this question is to say that we will do whatever is necessary to bring you a great service. That means that occasionally maintenance will be required, mostly planned but sometimes unplanned, and it will also mean that we will sometimes need to bring the system down in order to upgrade it with new features, like we're doing this weekend.

Have you given any thought to the distribution - and numbers - of your clients, when setting up your schedules?

Of course we have... I answered the following when asked this last year:

[gristgal]

Any idea what the problem is tonight? The admin control panel was intermittent starting about an hour ago, and it's been completely down since about 12:50 ET. I tried a refresh on a post I had open, and it's been hung for the last 7-8 minutes. Opening another post is hung, too.

[john]

As we just posted on the home page, we are experiencing an outage and are working to resolve the problem. My apologies for the inconvenience.

[gristgal]

Another outage? Site has been intermittently unavailable to visitors for the last couple of hours.

[john]

None of our monitors or logs show that there has been any outage nor performance degradation overnight, so my only guess is that there might have been some issues at your ISP or with your computer...