The Archive of our Own will be down for planned maintenance for approximately 90 minutes from 07.00 UTC on Thursday 26 July (see what time this is in your timezone). We’ll be upgrading our server software during this time (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!
Server software upgrades
This downtime will allow us to upgrade Nginx and MySQL on our servers. It’s important for us to keep this software up-to-date in order to avoid bugs and get better performance.
Nginx is web server software which everyone’s browser communicates with – when you come to the Archive and make a request for a work, Nginx does the job of communicating with the application and getting the data you wanted. It handles some information itself and passes requests on which are too complex for it.
MySQL is the database which handles all the persistent data in the Archive – that’s things like works. We’re updating this to a much more recent version of the software, which will bring us some performance gains. We’re also moving from the Oracle branch to Percona, which will bring us some additional benefits: it should give better performance than Oracle, and will also give us some additional instrumentation to monitor the database and identify problem areas. In addition, we hope to draw on the support of the company who produce it (also called Percona).
Users shouldn’t see any changes after this update. However, we wanted to keep this work separate from our recent RAM upgrade so that if any problems do arise, we will find it easier to identify the cause.
Mirrored from an original post on the Archive of Our Own.