It's absolutely possible, but it's not necessarily easy. How hard it is depends on a number of factors. If you need to bring the database down, keeping the site running with full functionality is capital-H-hard no matter what. It's not *impossible*, but it's *very* complex, and complex means expensive. Running the site in read-only mode while maintaining the database would be a lot simpler, but it's still work to do, and then you'd probably just get a million support tickets from people who are wondering why the heck the site doesn't work as it should. And that's IF you built the site to support a read-only mode. If you just keep it as is, people will either get errors (that are likely not very helpful to the average user) when posting stuff, or the site will just throw the data away without telling anyone about it, which is pretty much a capital crime in user experience design. Considering the response times for searches, and how different kinds of queries are handled, I'm going to assume BGG isn't using a search engine, but in case they do, pulling that down while keeping the site running has some similarities with pulling the database down, but due mainly to the fact that the database is the primary source of data, it's usually quite a lot easier to keep a site running while doing it. You can usually even keep making searches, but the index will be stale, so you might get some erroneous hits or miss hits for new items. That can be critical in some systems, but for BGG it most likely wouldn't matter too much.
If you just need to deploy a new front end (the stuff us users actually see), that's easy-peasy to do while the site is running. *BUT, *this is all supposing that you built the site with these things in mind to begin with. Because if you didn't, it might not be possible to separate these things without a major overhaul of the codebase. If you're really unlucky (which you probably are when you're working with a system that's over a decade old and has been developed to a large extent by volunteers (which I think is the case with BGG?)), then such an overhaul might be more work than just rebuilding the whole thing from scratch. So, depending on the structure of your codebase, and the nature of the maintenance you're doing, the work needed to keep the site running while you do it can range from spinning up a new virtual machine and flipping a switch in a config file somewhere, to overhauling your whole site before you can even begin thinking about it. So, what I'm saying is, give them some slack ;) On Monday, 8 March 2010 07:47:47 UTC+1, hskrfn822 wrote: > > It should be possible to do updates and system maintenance without > having to bring the site down at all. I've still never seen a site > with this much data and traffic run the it is and on subpar hardware > and programming. Not that I could do better, but I could hire people > that could. > On Mar 8, 12:24 am, Lacxox <[email protected]> wrote: > > Isn't it possible to choose a timing for these system maintenances > > that's not too bad for US and also not a "morning, European time"? > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BGG Down" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/bgg_down. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
