It’s true. The sites go down daily for about 30 minutes at 1am PST (Seattle time) while we backup our single database. That’s 9am London time, 4am New York time, 8am Sydney time. During these 30-ish minutes the sites simply don’t operate. However, we do have a plan to replicate the database.
A new, second database is already in the fleet of boxes that run the site and we hope to have it up and running … soon. Soon means that we’re learning as we go along here. Ivan and Eric are working on this together. We’ll let you know when the second database is up and running. At that point we’ll be able to backup the database daily without shutting the sites down and a celebration will be in order!
I should add that we originally chose 1am PST as it was mostly folks on the West Coast of the US using the sites. It began as us and our friends and grew out from there. Over time things have shifted and we’re now an international group of users. New York has displaced Seattle as our largest user base. London is a close third and Sydney and Shanghai are big players. That’s all a long-winded way of saying our night may be your day and we’re going to make the sites work 24-7 for all of us.
November 7, 2006 at 11:09 am
Yay! Great news - especially for those of us who like to give out cheers at that time!
November 7, 2006 at 12:29 pm
I’ve noticed that. Replication is the way to go! Beware of creating temp tables on the master db though. MySQL is a little buggy with that.
Also, I LOVE the new oops page.
November 8, 2006 at 2:47 am
Haha, I’ve always been relying on the 9am watershed to make me do at least half an hour’s work in the morning!! It’s been like a gentle reminder to use the office PC for _work_… It would be cool if you could fix it though, especially for weekends
November 8, 2006 at 7:04 am
Hang in there, Moose. Soon you’ll be cruising the site at 9am (you must be in London).
November 9, 2006 at 9:14 pm
Hey, Moose! Maybe you you could post in Japanese during that time, so you feel more like you’re getting some work done!!!
*GO ROBOTS!!!*
November 13, 2006 at 2:51 am
Urm, yay for progress, but images in my RSS feeds are still all wonky, showing up waaay larger than they used to… So, is it a bug or a feature?
November 13, 2006 at 6:51 am
replace MySQL with PostgreSQL, you won’t suffer from this anymore!
November 14, 2006 at 1:31 am
wow, I didn’t know London and Sydney were in adjacent time-zones.
November 14, 2006 at 3:42 pm
Yeah… the 9am (UK) downtime is just at the time when I’m trying to put off starting work for as long as possible. Fixing it would give me that excuse!
November 15, 2006 at 12:37 pm
Hey there is porn on the 43things zeitgeist.. but there is no way to contact you so… whatver.. its been up for at least 10 15 min.
November 15, 2006 at 1:15 pm
Thanks for the porn notice — we were at lunch, but I just removed the offending accounts and associated pictures.
November 16, 2006 at 2:19 pm
I didn’t know where to post this, so I’m sorry if this isn’t the right place. Just wanted to let you guys know that for some reason the extra like breaks between paragraphs aren’t showing up, so it looks like a big long entry with no paragraph separation.
I’m sure it’s how it’s rendered because the entry itself does contain the spaces when one goes to edit it.
Just an FYI. BTW, what _is_ a good way of telling you guys about these sort of things? Is the Ideas site a better place? Is that still active?
Thanks again guys!
November 16, 2006 at 2:32 pm
aardila — can you email me at robots at robotcoop dot com with a link to what you’re referring to? Thanks.
November 28, 2006 at 1:06 am
Hey. Its 8pm sydney time. Just so everyone knows. Not 8am sydney time, when that happens. Which is 7pm in Brisbane. Its better now though, as daylight savings has changed and before it was 6pm, but yeah, its great if its up 24/7.
November 28, 2006 at 5:17 am
Hey Trinah — sorry about that. Time zones always mess me up. I still call my family too early in Alaska when I think it’s an hour later.
We’re aiming to get the new database up this week — at which point the site should stop going down at 7pm Brisbane time. Hang on.