Legal Commentary

Server Upgrades Tonight

By Jeralyn

Even though we added a second dedicated server to TalkLeft a few months ago, we're still having occasional problems. Part of it may be that the average time a reader spends on TalkLeft has gradually increased to an astonishing 7 minutes. We started closing comments at 200 to reduce the demand on the databases, but that still hasn't fixed our problems. We went down the night of the Indiana and North Carolina primaries and again today.

The next step is to increase the memory on the servers. We'll be upgrading from 2 gigabites to 6 gigabytes around 2:00 am ET. The site will be down while the new memory is being installed. It shouldn't take more than 1/2 hour, but since we have quite a group of late night readers, myself included, I'm just giving everyone a heads up.

Server back up now: 12:33 am MT. 'Night everyone, this is an open thread and there's more there's more below.

I suspect traffic will fall off after the Democratic nomination is actually decided, as opposed to predicted, but that doesn't appear to be today or tomorrow. With the West Virginia primary Tuesday, which we'll be following closely and undoubtedly live blogging the results, tonight seemed the best time to do the upgrade.

So feel free to comment, this is an open thread, but if you can't log on for little bit, at least you know why. And thanks to all for your contributions last week -- without them the cost of the added memory would have been outside my price range.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on May 12, 2008 (boomark / email).