We’re currently building the latest version of the kernel for our Xeon database server. This should result in few minutes of downtime because we will need to boot into the new kernel. Because of the restart, we may lose some topic views counts. This is because the topic views is stored in memory first before it is written to the database to decrease load on the server. But we will try and minimize the view count lost.

It may be a few hours before we actually restart the server because it takes a while to build the kernel.

PS Other site Admins, heads up, PHP 5.3.0 is out and it is expected to improve performance on PHP in general.

We’re experiencing several server errors and memcache seems to be down and has halted site functions. We are working on resolving this issue. We regret the inconvenience caused.

EDIT : We’re back. Site is usable again.

The problem has now been fixed. However, in roughly 18 hours time we will be taking the server off line for roughly 15 minutes to replace our network card. That network card is the cause of the driver issue.

Other than that, we will now continue upgrading kernels throughout all of our servers.

We’re currently fixing a driver failure that has occurred after the kernel upgrade. Though it is not a major problem that impends the functionality of the site, it does cause a huge inconvenience on the server maintenance. Work is being done on the server to get this fixed. Please be patient.

If it does not work after another hour we will order some new hardware to be installed tomorrow.

We successfully upgraded to the latest version of PHP and a number of other updates are currently running smoothly. We did have an issue with an updated version of our firewall last night, however, that has been resolved.

Currently we’re preparing the installation of an updated kernel. This should help us improve the performance a bit especially in high demanding loads where the proc is saturated.

There will be downtime due to the kernel updates. This will result in a few reboots which must be done to test and boot into the kernel. However, the downtime should not last more than 5 minutes each. The time at which these reboots occur are arbitrary.

We’re currently upgrading PHP on all of our servers. The latest stable version of PHP is version 5.2.10. This was released on the 18th of June, 2009.

This update of PHP contains a number of bug fixes to PHP in general of which only a few affect us.

A changelog of the 5.2.x line can be found here.

There should be no downtime incurred as a result of this upgrade.

Our site is currently down due to a massive prune job that we completed. We’re current going through and committing all of the dirty pages in MySQL to make things stable once again. Please bare with us.

ETA for restoration is roughly 1 hour at the time of this post.

PS Wordpress has just been upgraded to 2.8, so there may not be a time on the blog posts. If that is the case then here is the current GMT time:

3:47pm Sunday (GMT) - Time in GMT

Since yesterday a lot of work has been done on the search itself. We have refined a number of settings to make sure that the server jerks that you may sometimes experience is minimized. It is not completely gone yet, but this should make it less noticable. An upgrade on the backend of the search is planned before 1.0 of the Sphinx plugin is released to help with this.

A lot of work is happening behind the scenes to get a site on our subdomains released. Kudos Devers for your work so far and keep it up

We’re also pruning the Graveyard, as per usual the same announcements will be made.

We’ll be performing server work, the site will have a few jerks along the way.

We’re sorry for the inconvenience.

We’re currently being attacked by a massive Distributed Denial of Service. Our datacenter and server admins are currently working on blocking it. Please be patient.

We’re sorry for the inconvenience.