Why are we suddenly at Defcon 5 again?

[Tommy_Carcetti]

All I see are Xs across the board.

Did Palin resign? What's the dealio?

[FedUpWithIt All]

1. I can't figure it out.

:shrug:

[Orsino]

2. There was a notice yesterday on the home page from Skinner...

...concerning front-end server upgrades to be performed over the next several days, I think. The hardware/software limitations were exacerbated by Gustav/Babygate traffic.

[dropkickpa]

6. Arghhh!!

Means I may have a longer than anticipated wait for mah donor star to get processed!!!!! I hate ads!!!

[TZ]

7. D'oh!

That means you have to wait a few days to get all that nasty skeptical snark out....Of course you could just hang out in Health...:P

[dropkickpa]

8. It's killin' me I tell ya!!

I full up to HERE with snark, bursting at the seams!

[mike_c]

9. Firefox + Adblock add-on is your friend....

What ads?

[dropkickpa]

10. Work doesn't like firefox and stuff

The IT guy does for his stuff, but has to keep all us peons on the same page.

[lizziegrace]

3. From Skinner's Journal

As you may know, we upgraded our database server earlier this year in order to keep up with the expected increase in traffic this election year.

It just so happens that last Friday -- the day after Barack Obama's acceptance speech, and the day of John McCain's disastrous VP choice -- was our busiest day since election day of 2006. And our servers handled the massive traffic increase much better than we expected. We had to institute some minor limits on functionality, but overall we were very pleased with the results. We believed that we were probably going to be fine until November.

Or, um... until Monday.

It seems that the double-whammy of Hurricane Gustav and Governor Palin's soon-to-be-grandparent status has hit us even harder than the epic news day we had last Friday. The good news is that our new database server is handling the traffic very well. The bad news is that our three front-end servers are not keeping up with the stress. I suspect that this spike will be relatively short-lived, and we should be back to normal by the end of the day today.

I have instructed Elad to upgrade our three front-end servers as soon as possible. Because today is a holiday, he cannot start the process until tomorrow morning. We hope that we can have our upgrades finished relatively soon so that we will be ready for the next news spike. Which, if the track record of the McCain campaign is any indication, ought to be sometime in the next week or two.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

And while I have your attention: Our hearts go out the members of our DU family who live on the Gulf Coast. Be safe.

David Allen
DU Administrator

[NJmaverick]

4. Just an educated guess, but I am thinking this is more

technical problem, than traffic related

[hedgehog]

5. California just got up and had its first cup of coffee!