The Archive of our Own will be down for planned maintenance for approximately three hours from 15.00 UTC on Friday 20 July (see what time this is in your timezone). During this period we’ll be installing some new RAM and performing some other maintenance (more details below for the curious!).
We’ll keep users updated on our Twitter AO3_Status as the work progresses. Thanks for your patience while we complete this work!
New RAM
Our database server looking grumpy about having too little RAM!
We’re doubling the RAM in our database server and in our two application servers. Increasing RAM will help our system cope with more users: for example, it will allow us to run more unicorn workers, which serve up the content you’re trying to access. This should help site performance as the site expands.
You can imagine the unicorns lining up in the hall of RAM to fetch you things from the treasure trove of fanworks: if there aren’t many unicorns, you have to wait till one can serve you, which sometimes means you get a 502 error. We can increase the number of unicorns to make things go faster for you, but if the hall is too small (there isn’t enough RAM) then things get crowded and inefficient and everything slows down again. More RAM allows us to increase the number of unicorns without slowing things down. (For the interested, this more technical explanation of Unicorn isn’t exactly the way things are set up on the AO3, but will give you an idea.)
New drives
We’re also installing some new drives in our two oldest machines. Both these machines have room for six drives; currently they each have four installed. Information is mirrored on the drives so that if one goes down, the system continues to work. At the moment, one machine has a broken drive. We’ll be replacing the broken drive, and at the same time adding two spares to both machines so that we have more backups if anything else breaks.
Our two original machines preparing to nom their new drives
Mirrored from an original post on the Archive of Our Own.