Analytics Expert Blog

We need to perform maintenance on a few database servers this weekend. This will begin on Friday night around 8-10 PM (USA PST), and will last 8-10 hours. Affected servers are db7, 8, and 9. The database server that any site is hosted on can be found on that site’s main preference page.

These are all fairly old servers, although they were opened up for some new sites for a couple of weeks in the beginning of 2010. Usually we only have to do this kind of maintenance on older servers so it doesn’t affect too many people (since typically speaking, the longer you’ve been a member, the less often you log on). Unfortunately, this is not the case for everyone this time, since these servers have some sites registered as recently as 3 months ago.

When we do this type of maintenance we usually take the affected servers fully offline. However, due to complaints we are going to try a new method this time where they stay online so you can still view your stats, but no new data will be processed while the maintenance is happening. This will slow down the maintenance to some degree, but we think it will still be acceptably fast, especially since Friday night / Saturday morning is the lowest traffic levels of the week. We will be monitoring the performance and if we decide it’s slowing it down too much, we will take them offline so that they can finish as quickly as possible, but we hope to not have to do that.

Our new release, that will include pinging and cookie support in the tracking code, much more accurate unique visitor and time online values, as well as tracking new vs returning visitors, is coming along really well. We were hoping to get it out the door this weekend, but combined with the database maintenance, it is just too much. So we are delaying it until next weekend. There are a couple of major database changes that in this new release, so every database server will have to be taken fully offline for approximately 2 hours while the changes are made. We plan to do this on a Friday night as well, so the least number of people are affected.

During maintenance periods, your traffic data is still logged, but it is not processed until the database comes back online. So don’t worry, you won’t lose any stats! But they will be lagging behind real time when they come back online for at least a couple of hours.

We are also always tweeting live updates during maintenance, so be sure to follow us on Twitter to for up the minute updates.