It was the same weird thing which caused a few hours of downtime 6-12 months ago, and I think it's what causes the few minutes of downtime people observe every few weeks. I've never been able to figure out what causes it. It looks like the network gets cut between the web server and the database for a while. It seems to always happen at around the same time, so I suppose it's probably some automated maintenance process messing something up, but I don't have anything running at this time, so I wonder if it's something in the web-host's networking infrastructure, or something like that. It's difficult to diagnose, since it happens rarely, and usually when I'm sleeping.
Ok so theymos made the "I" bold...
"I don't have anything running at this time"... does it mean someone else have been running things but theymos don't want to name him
This reminds me of working on one project where daily backup of the database used to take ages (3-4 hours) and during this time no one was allowed to run any thing on the server. But as soon as we use to start backup someone will run some other tasks on the server everyone in db team started running around and asking who's running that? who's doing this? and everybody will be like... no I didn't run anything, but we knew who's doing that (The few minutes of downtime just now was due to me doing something, and is unrelated.)
So for those few minutes of downtime you caused, hey, we all have our moments, right? At least we can blame that on you.
Anyway thanks for keeping the ship sailing, even when those rare downtimes. We appreciate your hard work!
I'm planning on upgrading the main servers sometime in the next few months. (Just as part of standard maintenance: there will be no user-visible changes other than perhaps slightly improved speed.) Maybe that'll fix it just by virtue of moving things to different areas.
Also it's great to hear you're planning an upgrade in the moving things around might just be the secret sauce to overcome the mysterious downtime. And "slightly improved speed" – it's huge, every millisecond counts in the bitcoin world!
"there will be no user-visible changes" yeah thank you, but when? When there will be user-visible changes