A Note on the Early Morning Maintenance/Install Window

Hi folks -- as most of you have figured out by now, I'm not a morning person. So, I rarely experience first-hand a phenomena that some of you early-risers report from time to time: problems accessing or posting to Journals in the early morning hours (like at around 6am ET).

What typically happens is that you'll have a problem with Journals somewhere around 6am; you'll send me a mail reporting the problem; I'll read it at around 10am or so, and when I take a look, Journals will be working fine.

For these kinds of early-morning outages, the most common explanation is that the tech folks were doing maintenance or installs during the install window, which is between the hours of 4am-6am ET.

4am-6am is usually the point of lowest activity for any given US audience -- the West Coast has gone to sleep, and the East Coast hasn't woken up yet, so the least people will be affected if something has to be taken down for maintenance or installs. (Some types of work can be done during the day without affecting anyone, but some things require a scheduled outage. It's kind of like how you can't work on a car engine while it's driving down the road.)

Of course, even if it's the dead of night, an outage will still affect some people -- our International users, as well as those US folks who are up during the maintenance window. It's one of those "greatest good for the greatest amount of people" things and no matter what time you pick, you're going to impact someone, so apologies for those affected.

Now, if the Journals tech team knows that they'll be doing work that's going to cause an outage during the scheduled install window, they're pretty good about letting me know so I can tell you ahead of time.

However, maintenance done on other systems -- rostering, authentication, hamster wheel lubrication, etc. -- may also impact Journals, and a lot of times, we won't find out about those ahead of time. So, again, apologies for the inconvenience.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: AOL Journals, scheduled outages, install window, AOL Journals status

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This entry has 3 comments: (Add your own)

#3 Comment from journalseditorEntry Author
8/31/06 8:30 PM | Permalink

Hi Lori -- as I noted, there's no perfect time; 3am ET is midnight PT, so you'd hit the West Coast late nighters. Fortunately, while the install window is 2 hours, a lot of times the work doesn't take that long.

One thing I would like to see, though, is improved error messaging -- though that still doesn't necessarily help us when a separate, non-Journals system is down for work that impacts Journals. Thanks -- Joe
#2 Comment from marainey1
8/31/06 8:14 PM | Permalink

I do appreciate it when you let us know of a scheduled maintenance, but it is frustrating when you don't. Thankfully it doesn't happen very often. 'On Ya' - ma
#1 Comment from my78novata
8/31/06 8:09 PM | Permalink

seems like to me most of the slow time is 3-5 no four six I have so many joruanls friends who try to make an entry before work wish they wouldchange that time.

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A Note on the Early Morning Maintenance/Install Window