Server maintenance. What are they actually doing?

talk random
1

MMOs, Forums, sites in generall, they all go down for server maintenance from time to time. And I’ve always wondered, what are they actually doing during these downtimes? I mean hardware don’t exactly degrade like an engine does. Are they just defragging HDDs basically?

Thanks!

2

I would assume they are basically never defragging hard drives. Most likely they’re fixing a bug or upgrading/updating part of the software that interacts with the database.

3

Most servers use filesystems that don’t really fragment. Essentially, that’s only a problem for Windows’s NTFS and FAT filesystems. :stuck_out_tongue:

For the most part, nobody is correct — they’re just upgrading software and such. They will probably clean out stuff like /tmp and such, too, and boot clean following a filesystem check (fsck).

4

Unions require server admins to give the gerbils a 30 minute break from their wheels every 28 hours to smoke cigarettes and drink coffee (they run a lot).

5

Whenever these forums go down at around midnight-ish, it is to basically do a repair/optimize on tables in MySQL.

6

^ What kirupa said. Repair/Optimize to keep them up-to-date. And what nobody said, to upgrade software.

7

^Thanks for the validation.

8

You’re welcome! :slight_smile: Though, I might be missing some things, as this also depends on the owner or the people who maintain them.

9

Your footer really does represent you kdd. :lol:

10

For an MMO they are probably wide scale patching the entire clusters for each server group. This probably isn’t the fastest thing when you figure there are like 3 bajllion people in some games.

For anything else they are probably just doing normal maintenance like k said.

11

Cleaning up log files and taking backups of them, cleaning up all temp and cache dirs and backing them up. Restarting the hardware, restarting httpd and that jazz, troubleseeking database environmental vars and adjusting (lowmem_prunes and such) installing new software and replacing old hardware.

12

[ot]Thanks Phenex! :lol:[/ot]

13

Some sites just do it to be cool and gain attention. cough TWITTER cough

14

^ hahahahaha

Same goes for jaiku, with their overheating crap