In Memorium Webpage

[andrewilley]

And again today at about 8:40am GMT (but I think America did its Daylight Saving Time adjustment this morning, ahead of most other countries, so that would still be the same Eastern time as before if we're only four hours apart now).

Andre

 

[Oz Mouseketeer]

I was about to start a thread on this myself before I stumbled across this one - South Australian local here, and I experience the Memorial page every night from about 730pm onwards - I figured DISboards closed down at a particular time of the day in the US every time for "maintenance" and that it was just the default offline page, but then started experiencing the same Memorial page at other odd times of the day too...

Annoying, given the best time of the day for me to scout the forums is home at night while Im relaxing on the couch - I just wanted to check in and see if DISboards was actually taken offline at a particular time of the day (routinely, every day) for maintenance, of it was indeed a glitch...

 

[andrewilley]

Yesterday, Marsha's page from about 8:15am for half an hour or so.

Today, I got a server error 500 from about 8:14am, then Marsha's page from 8:25am until around 8:45am (GMT, so minus four hours for Floridian time). Currently getting pages back, but very slowly.

Andre

 

[andrewilley]

And again today, server 500 timeouts from about 8:10am GMT, then Marsha page from about 8:25am. DIS back online by 9am (but still running a bit slowly at the moment).

Andre

 

[Physics Guy]

The silence is deafening.

 

[Sundancer UK]

Adding my voice to this. I'm in the UK and get that hour of downtime each morning. Like Andre I've noticed it's shifted with the clocks going forward in the US.
I agree that the in memoriam page is an odd choice!

 

[WebmasterCricket]

I do read everything here, I just don't have any update yet.

 

[WebmasterMaryJo]

It's hard to believe that years of friendship are just a memory now.

 

[andrewilley]

The usual pattern again this morning, server timeouts from around 8:15am GMT, and the memorial page from 8:20 onward.

I guess just re-assigning the default "system down" page to some sort of regular error message would be a start, as bringing up a Memorial page whenever the server stops working seems almost, well a bit disrespectful in an odd way. It even feels strange having to post about it here.

Andre

 

[WebmasterAlex]

It was a file in the wrong place, should be fixed now and you should get the standard error page.
Sorry for the downtime but we do have to backup some time!

 

[andrewilley]

Thanks Alex, the redirect to the tribute page has now stopped happening.

However from 8am GMT (4am Eastern) there is now a generic vBulletin database error message, rather than any sort of DIS-specific "system is down for scheduled daily maintenance tasks" type page.

Warning: file_get_contents(/usr/local/lsws/disboards/htdocs/includes/database_error_message.html) [function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /usr/local/lsws/disboards/htdocs/includes/class_core.php on line 998

Database error The database has encountered a problem. Please try the following:

• Load the page again by clicking the Refresh button in your web browser.
• Open the www.disboards.com home page, then try to open another page.
• Click the Back button to try another link.

The www.disboards.com forum technical staff have been notified of the error, though you may contact them if the problem persists.
We apologise for any inconvenience.

(do you really get "notified of this error" every day by the way?)

I wonder if there is any way to reduce the priority of the backup task so it can work more transparently in the background, only slowing the system down from 4am for a couple of hours rather than knocking it out completely for almost an hour every day? Just a thought.

Andre

 

[WebmasterAlex]

Andre,
Our servers are hosted and while we do have root level control over the servers we are dependent on the hosts backup systems. That does seem awfully long and I will have hosts tech support take a look at the issue

 

[andrewilley]

The daily downtime varies, but I would say it is very common for it to go down at just after 8am GMT (4am Eastern) and not be available again until fairly close to 9am (5am Eastern). If it's up much before 9am, page response time is very sluggish, and prior to that it's hard down.

I had similar problems with my own site at one point, but as it's only tiny compared to the DISboards I'm only using shared hosting so I just got them to move my site over to a quieter server where the backup process was less intrusive. Or so Pingdom tells me anyway, I'm usually asleep.

Andre