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I have a technical question related to this post. On the front page of the site there's a prominent announcement that the site will be offline for 48 hours for

by japhyr 6y ago

I have a technical question related to this post. On the front page of the site there's a prominent announcement that the site will be offline for 48 hours for a database migration. Is this fairly common, and is this reasonable? I've made some small sites but nothing that's ever gained real traction. I've always told myself that if I build something that starts to take off I should learn to do maintenance without interrupting availability. But I also remind myself that for anything I'm likely to build, it would probably be perfectly reasonable to take the site offline for an hour or two to take care of maintenance tasks and updates. I like seeing this approach, and I really like the communication style in the section "What can I do while eBird is down?" Can anyone with experience maintaining a project of this scale comment on how reasonable a 48-hour downtime period is? https://ebird.org/news/database-update-november-17-19-maintenance https://ebird.org/news/database-update-november-17-19-mainte...

mongol 6y ago
It would not be reasonable for a commercial operation that makes money every minute around the clock. But they also need to build their systems differently to avoid downtime for reasons such as these. For a non-commercial organization, it can be different. It all depends on the value and cost of uptime/downtime.
- Symbiote 6y ago
  There are even commercial operations who can have scheduled downtime. Last time I wanted to check on my savings account, the bank was doing maintenance all Sunday.
  - mongol 6y ago
    Yes where I work (large ecommerce site), there is scheduled downtime once in a while. Not ideal if course, but continuous unlimited uptime at scale is not trivial.
Exmoor 6y ago
I can't speak much about your technical question, but I can provide some context as someone who's used eBird heavily for almost a decade. eBird does go down for maintenance (both planned and unplanned) every few months, but to my memory this is by far the longest maintenance window they've ever done and it has obviously been telegraphed months in advance and almost certainly planned for a time when the site saw lower usage (Mid November is the closest thing you'll likely get to a worldwide low point in bird migration). They haven't made any announcements about what they're doing during this window, but I would expect it's a pretty monumental change or several large changes they've been holding off on for a long time. It's also worth noting that this is a fairly small non-profit operation. It might be possible to do what they're doing without taking the site offline, but perhaps it would require taking their devs off other projects for several months to make it happen?
redvenom 6y ago
I've been using eBird for several years and this is the first time this has ever happened. eBird has great uptime usually. By the way if you are interested, the complete database in text format is around 300GB.

by japhyr 6y ago

mongol 6y ago

It would not be reasonable for a commercial operation that makes money every minute around the clock. But they also need to build their systems differently to avoid downtime for reasons such as these. For a non-commercial organization, it can be different. It all depends on the value and cost of uptime/downtime.

Symbiote 6y ago
There are even commercial operations who can have scheduled downtime. Last time I wanted to check on my savings account, the bank was doing maintenance all Sunday.
- mongol 6y ago
  Yes where I work (large ecommerce site), there is scheduled downtime once in a while. Not ideal if course, but continuous unlimited uptime at scale is not trivial.

Exmoor 6y ago

I can't speak much about your technical question, but I can provide some context as someone who's used eBird heavily for almost a decade. eBird does go down for maintenance (both planned and unplanned) every few months, but to my memory this is by far the longest maintenance window they've ever done and it has obviously been telegraphed months in advance and almost certainly planned for a time when the site saw lower usage (Mid November is the closest thing you'll likely get to a worldwide low point in bird migration). They haven't made any announcements about what they're doing during this window, but I would expect it's a pretty monumental change or several large changes they've been holding off on for a long time. It's also worth noting that this is a fairly small non-profit operation. It might be possible to do what they're doing without taking the site offline, but perhaps it would require taking their devs off other projects for several months to make it happen?

redvenom 6y ago

I've been using eBird for several years and this is the first time this has ever happened. eBird has great uptime usually. By the way if you are interested, the complete database in text format is around 300GB.