Daily forum downtime getting longer?
 

Every evening at about 7:30pm NZST (so somewhere in the very early hours in the States), this forum times out with a Database error whenever I try to access it. This is typically about the time of the evening when I'm most likely to be on, so it's a bit of an inconvenience, but I understand that this is a international forum, and I'm probably right in the middle of that part of the 24h cycle where visitor numbers are generally at their lowest, so I can live with a daily downtime if that's what's needed to keep things going.

What I have noticed in the last couple of weeks however, is that the downtime period seems to have increased. Previously it would seem to last almost exactly 10 minutes with very little variation, but lately that figure has been closer to 15 or 20 minutes. Tonight was particularly bad for me, where I had issues for a full 25 minutes before things finally started to come right shortly before 8pm.

Is everything OK with these daily downtimes or is it just me?

g'day Grav :wave:

The forum's daily database re-indexing takes place around 03:00 - 04:00 a.m. Central Time, which would be 20:00 - 21:00 (8:00 - 9:00) p.m. NZ Time. The server doesn't actually shut down or go offline .. but it does slow things down and sometimes "hiccups" occur .. especially when trying to submit a post.

That being said, I've also seen "database error" message a few times (brief) in recent weeks which shouldn't happen as Admin, it's essential that I have priority access. The webmaster is currently checking some issues with our mail server which may be causing problems :idea:.

Thanks for your patience :rose:


Doreen

Oh wow, it's a re-indexing that's doing that? Interesting. I assume there's a good reason for doing it nightly, as opposed to say weekly for example? I imagine it's a pretty big DB to be fair, considering how long this site's been around.

Thanks for the info anyway, Doreen. I'm sure I can live with it. :)

Getting similar issues here in UK, but it's at 0800 BST.

The time I wrote earlier may be off by an hour for part of the year due to Daylight Saving vs. Standard time. Forgot to mention that :o

We did experience a database corruption last weekend (discussed here) which caused hanging, lockouts and error messages for *everyone* for an extended period of time (36+ hours). However, that situation had nothing to do per se with this daily automated db update/indexing.

I don't really have a suggestion other than to avoid trying to post during the daily slowdown period, especially if you know that it's happening at the same time every day. Sigh.

Doreen

I noticed that. ;) Over the summer, I worked at 5:30 am EDT and was usually up around 3:30. I had to set my alarm for 3:00 so I could get my forum time to update my challenges before the 3:30 am indexing. Heh.