In order to immediately improve the performance of our system, we are scheduling maintenance windows for the following periods:
- 8/23/2005 (Tue.), 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM EDT
- 8/26/2005 (Fri.), 12:00 AM - 2:00 AM EDT
During these periods, both weblogs and the admin control panel will be offline as maintenance is performed.
What is this maintenance for?
We've identified several issues which have been causing problems as of late when posting or commenting to blogs on our network, problems for which we apologize.
These problems are caused for the most part due to issues with the way our database queries were constructed, and the way our database is structured. We've identified several scenarios in which database queries to display and update certain weblogs are consuming excessive resources. These queries hold up other queries, such as ones which are intended to insert comments or articles into the database. These delays cascade, until the servers are no longer able to handle additional requests.
In order to eliminate the "bottlenecks" which are causing these issues, we will be implementing a software upgrade tomorrow evening which will optimize our database queries. In the maintenance scheduled for the early morning hours on Thursday, our database itself will be optimized and restructured in order to facilitate faster searching and updating. Simultaneously, we will update our software to take advantage of the restructured database, and also will add some measures which will allow us more flexibility in spam protection and other abuse prevention at the network level.
We apologize for the short notice for this maintenance window, but we feel that it is necessary to immediately improve the reliability of our system by performing this maintenance.
Thank you for your continued support.
