Statement Regarding Board outages and downtime

[stormtracker]

UPDATE 9/5/2011: OUTAGE ISSUE FOUND AND RESOLVED

Outages linked to a board module that was pulling the 10 latest posts and this search, given the size of our database and the additional load it was receiving during the hurricane, caused it to crash. Since learning of where the query was originating and disabling the module, no crashes have occured in over 2 days now. We have informed Invision Power Services of the issue and have offered to work with us if we ever need to use this module in the future.

UPDATE 8/31/2011: We are making significant progress with troubleshooting the issues that have caused the board to fail over the past five days. While we believe we know the exact cause, we need to go through more troubleshooting steps and unfortunately this may mean some additional board outages.

We are developing a comprehensive solution to the issues that we believe are causing the board downtime and we will share these with you once we get it in place.

Again, thank you for your patience and continue to monitor this space for updates.

To our members:

First, let us offer our apologies for the recent and all too frequent board downtime. We know that this is frustrating. Rest assured, we areworking to remedy the situation.

Our two board techs, John and Scott have been working diligently behind the scenes ever since the first outage to first identify the source of the issue and then fix it. Also, we have brought in outside consultants and a network engineer with our current hosting company, but so far they have been unable to successfully resolve the issues that continue to plague the board.

At this time, we do not believe the issue is related to traffic, since the board has been down during our light periods (between 2 am and 7 am). Early indications are that this may either be a server configuration issue or a database issue. We will continue to keep you updated on our progress in resolving this issue.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.