Early morning, no Disboards

maxiesmom

The Mean Squinty Eye Works
Joined
Jul 6, 2004
Why are the Disboards not up all of the time? The last 3 mornings I have noticed that when I go to get on, I get an error message. It is around 5 am when this happens.
 
Why are the Disboards not up all of the time? The last 3 mornings I have noticed that when I go to get on, I get an error message. It is around 5 am when this happens.

Maybe they're still doing some "tweaks" that require being offline briefly. And they try to do it during the hours that, typically, not many people are on the boards.
 
I haven't checked since the new boards arrived, but prior to that, I could never access the boards starting at about 4:10am ET. Don't know what time access was restored, but it was 100% consistent for me. No access starting at ~4:10am ET.
 


I have noticed the same thing....need my board fix to wake up!! :(
 
Me too. It's irritating as early morning is when I usually have time to myself to drink my coffee and catch up on the boards:(
 
Yup...same issues. Took an hour or so before I could get in. Today was first day though.
 


Same thing again today, though it seemed to last longer. I get the message "An unexpected database error has occurred." Though at this point, it is no longer unexpected.:sad2:

I hope this isn't a permanent thing.
 
I had that error around 7:30am this morning. But it was the first time I've experienced it.
 
Being in Europe, for me it was during the day...

In the past the DIS was always down from 4am EST on, it usually lasted about 30 to 45 mines. After the switch over, the first few days there was no down time. the recent days the downtime was much longer than before. That's why all of you started to notice it. I guess very few people in the US were interested in being on the DIS between 4 and 5am. :surfweb:
 
This daily downtime will be caused, I'm fairly sure, by overnight database backups which are so resource-heavy that the system can no longer respond to normal user activity.

On the old boards, this used to happen at 4am EST (9am UK, which sadly is when I regularly want to use the boards) and lasted for about 40-50 minutes. The new boards initially didn't seem to have this problem at all (perhaps the backup regime has only recently been set up?) but are now taking considerably longer than before, starting at about 9am and not finishing today until 10:25am (5:25am EST).

Backups are vital of course, but it does seem to be getting towards the point of being counter-productive. I think having the boards offline for one-and-a-half hours every day should be a concern for the admins, especially when all the users see is a plain-text database error message or a page-load failure screen.

@WebmasterAlex @WebmasterCorey : If this cannot be optimised, at least could a more user-friendly message be generated when the boards are offline for backup? Maybe "Please pardon our appearance, this area is being backed up for your future enjoyment" ;) Thanks!

Andre
 
This is happening to me too. At first when the boards came up on the new software, I noticed that I could access them at 4am EST, now I cannot. I only notice this because this is my morning treadmill time. It would be great if I could use this time to "DIS" in the mornings, but I understand if I cannot. Viewing trip reports helps me get through my workouts .
 
Any more thoughts on this from the webmasters and admins? The system is still hard-down for about 90 minutes from 9am (UK time) every morning, which cannot be a good thing however important the underlying reason. That's more than 45 hours offline per month, giving an overall site uptime of around 93%.

If my own (admittedly much smaller) website had that amount of regular downtime I'd be screaming at my hosting company long before it got that bad. (Last month for example, my site had a total of 6 minutes of logged downtime, and most of that was my own fault while I was updating some php code).

Andre
 
The system is still hard-down for about 90 minutes from 9am (UK time) every morning, which cannot be a good thing however important the underlying reason. That's more than 45 hours offline per month, giving an overall site uptime of around 93%.

I also think that there seems to be a not so small number of European users for whom the downtime is at a very unconvenient time. I have heard quite a few people comment about this on other threads in the other parts of the DIS as well.
 
I really hope this isn't a permanent thing. A board this size shouldn't have to shut down almost every day.
 
@WebmasterAlex
Board backup window?

I'm sure that'll be the cause (see my earlier message). However a backup regime which takes your production SQL server down for 45 hours a month is certainly not an ideal situation, as I'm sure you'll agree.

Perhaps the backup process could be set to a much lower task priority (which would take longer, but won't give such a serious performance hit) or maybe disabling compression during the backup process might help keep the CPU load down, if that's the problem? (and then compress it later on your backup device)

Andre
 
The system was back up a little earlier this morning, by around 9:30am (4:30am EST... oh hang on, ignore me, America changed its clocks last night out of sync with the rest of the world, so UK downtime will now be 8am-9:30am for the next few weeks).

In case the admins want to know by the way, the initial error message is normally:
upload_2015-3-8_10-35-25.png

Followed later into the outage with a more generic 500 error:
upload_2015-3-8_10-31-8.png

The wdwinfo.com domain is not affected, only disboards.com (which is to be expected if it is a forum database backup that is causing these outages).

Andre
 
Yes I have this issue too, every day at the same time.
 

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