E-R.org's servers and "Monday morning syndrome"

[Nords]

Andy, a cursory check of the status board shows that the last month has had outages on the morning of the week's first workday. (Those are just the outages that I happened to be around to see.) From my Hawaii time zone I'm getting the impression that Mainland readers are taking their first coffee break and visiting the board... which goes down shortly after thousands of workers have the same great idea at the same time. Outages are usually five minutes or less but they're frequent and they're enervating. If this board was a sewage-processing facility (and I'm not necessarily claiming that isn't the case) then the overload would be pretty nasty.

Dory & BMJ used to have the board's statistics linked from the home page for anyone to read-- number of users online broken down by calendar & time of day, as well as "Top 10 posters" for various categories like number of posts, number of threads started, and total days/hours spent on the board. How can today's users see the board's history and busiest times? Can posters access a list of when the board's been "unavailable", allowing them to schedule their coffee breaks accordingly?

In addition to sharing their uptime data, perhaps the server provider's "load optimization" needs a bit of tweaking. Hopefully they can improve their customer service (perhaps even boosting their capacity on the first workday of the week) to earn all those righteous bucks you're paying them.

Besides, if the board's not up then no one is clicking on the ads.

 

[CybrMike]

If they need help tweaking apache or the server, I can help. Just PM or email me.

 

[Andy R]

How can today's users see the board's history and busiest times?

I will look for a stat package for this. I don't recall a feature addition that shows those exact stats but I know some expanded stats packages are available. On a side note, I use Google Analytics for that info but it's not publicly available.

Can posters access a list of when the board's been "unavailable", allowing them to schedule their coffee breaks accordingly?

Nope. I just reviewed my Cacti resource monitoring software (link) and do not see any drops in traffic over the external Ethernet cards on either of the web servers on Monday. I will let the server admins know and see if they can find any issues.