Hello everyone! I haven't had to do a post about upcoming downtime in a while... too bad I have to spoil the streak!

Subeta will be down tonight at approximately 3 am Subeta time (EST) while we synchronize our database servers. The procedure may take anywhere from half an hour to 2 hours, depending on how nice the servers decide to be.

You may have noticed that Subeta's been pretty squirrel-y lately. :P What's going on is that our database has been growing in size pretty steadily, and it's starting to get too big for the cage we keep it in.

Okay, so it's not really kept in a cage, but on a computer disk. Right now the database isn't too big for the disk (if it were, we'd have a pretty serious problem), but also stored on the disk are log files that the slave database server uses to stay synchronized. Since there's been less and less space for these log files and they keep growing in size, they've been taking up all the remaining space on the disk, causing things to come to a spectacular grinding halt (and forcing us to manually intervene).

We're working on getting the configuration right so these log files get deleted before they jam up the works, but Subeta has been growing faster than we've anticipated (yay for us!) We are of course planning to increase disk space as well, but this is a tricky procedure as we use <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive">special super-fast disks</a>.