Upcoming Board Outages

[Ran]

We upgraded the board to the latest version of the software, but this necessitates us doing a rebuild of the contents of the database to take advantage of effeciency improvements. Unfortunately, the database is so large at this point that the rebuild process simply chokes, and with it goes the whole board, and then the whole server. This is a problem not only for the members of the board, but for the other sites hosted on the same server, and we'd like to be a good neighbor.

So, what we will need to do is prune the forums of excess posts, the usual house cleaning, and then run the rebuild.

To do this as quickly and as securely as possible, we've decided that we will be pruning the forum over the course of several days. Each time we start pruning, we will shut down access to the board until such time as the pruning is completed.

I'm unable to give a precise schedule, as I'd like to time it for when our sys admin and host is available in case any problems develop and her schedule is variable. I'd guess mostly this pruning will be taking place in the U.S. late afternoon/early evening, and that the board will be offline for as much as an hour (or more, if problems develop) during this period.

Once the pruning is completed, the last step will be to shut down the board for a couple of hours and run the content rebuild process. Once that is completed, we should be able to proceed as usual.

After this, we will be more stringent about keeping the forum pruned, which will mean placing the board offline on a monthly basis so as to be able to get the pruning done as swiftly as possible.