The Robot Co-op

We’re going to activate the new database we’ve been talking about in recent weeks. This will allow the site to be up 24/7. We’ll no longer bring the sites down daily to backup the database. Exciting times!

The best part is that it’s an avid 43T user who is doing the behind-the-scenes work to make this happen. Chuq will be bringing the db online tomorrow. Go Chuq!

Chuq is pretty much a legend around the office as he was the first person to push the limit of things done. Currently Chuq has done 3,441 things. No joke.

We plan to be down for less than 60 minutes. Could be less; could be more if we run into any unforeseen issues. We’ll post updates here if things get crunchy.

UPDATE (Nov. 29 10pm PST): Aborting mission tonight. Chuq is diligently working with Eric & Ivan. It’s taking longer than expected so we decided to do a little more prep work and take another swing at the piñata in a day or so. Stay tuned kids.

“Box” in this case means webserver. Prior to last week there were two webservers dedicated to 43 Things. Now there are three. One could argue (as I will) that this makes the site more stable. Not necessarily faster, but healthier in general. We’ve managed to stablize quite a few performance issues and errors over the past few weeks and we’re still working on delivering more Woot! and less Oops!

It’s true. The sites go down daily for about 30 minutes at 1am PST (Seattle time) while we backup our single database. That’s 9am London time, 4am New York time, 8am Sydney time. During these 30-ish minutes the sites simply don’t operate. However, we do have a plan to replicate the database.

A new, second database is already in the fleet of boxes that run the site and we hope to have it up and running … soon. Soon means that we’re learning as we go along here. Ivan and Eric are working on this together. We’ll let you know when the second database is up and running. At that point we’ll be able to backup the database daily without shutting the sites down and a celebration will be in order!

I should add that we originally chose 1am PST as it was mostly folks on the West Coast of the US using the sites. It began as us and our friends and grew out from there. Over time things have shifted and we’re now an international group of users. New York has displaced Seattle as our largest user base. London is a close third and Sydney and Shanghai are big players. That’s all a long-winded way of saying our night may be your day and we’re going to make the sites work 24-7 for all of us.