At midnight every day the site does its daily maintenance which basically involves executing a bunch of code that I've written which is meant to optimize the database and also update various pages of the site allowing them to perform better. The problem has always been that the traffic interferes with this, causing it to take longer and ultimately causing the site to be really slow up to an hour or more. So I've come up with a solution which I think will help.

For a few minutes after midnight (server time which is central time) the site will be unavailable to everyone (except me) allowing my codes to execute without interference. I've also made it so that the site gives all users a 15 minute warning letting them know that the site will be unavailable for a few minutes due to maintenance.

The down time is different depending on the day of week and month.
Most days = 2 minutes
Mondays = 3 minutes
1st of the month = 4 minutes

Last night was the first time this went into affect and it went really well. The site didn't seem to have its usual slow down from what I saw. I'll be analyzing this for the next few days to see if this trend continues.

My next post will show what message users get during this time. If you have any suggestions for it, please let me know.

Davideo7 : 2-5 minutes doesn't sound too incredibly bad because with a short time span, no one would really notice (unless they're making a post between 12:00-12:05 A.M. (Server/Central Time)). Plus also with people competing in TdV wouldn't have much of an issue because Midnight starts a new day.

IgorBird122 : Yeah it wouldn't affect the TdV at all and users shouldn't be able to complain since they'll have a 15 minute warning. It's a very small price to pay considering how much this could potentially speed up the site during the hours that the site is usually slow.

Davideo7 : Yep, best to sacrifice a few minutes a day to get a better performance for Vizzed.

I love this. Well, I don't love losing access to the site at midnight server time but I love that you've hopefully found a way to keep the site from having any other downtime.

Obviously it would be nice if a later time in the night could be used but with the membership being all over the world any time would affect people. Still, I see 2 AM being a better time overall (West coast is 10 PM when this happens).

Regardless, I hope to see fewer random downtimes happening.

This would not affect people already playing a game right? They've already got the game downloaded and running so they wouldn't experience any interruptions?

geeogree : It has to be midnight server time since that's when a new day starts on Vizzed and there are a lot of new day related things that need to be executed.

Anyone playing a game wouldn't be affected. I'm pretty sure anyone in the chat room wouldn't be affected either and anyone in the middle of a netplay session should also not be affected.

Fair enough. Like I said, it is likely as good a time as any really. No matter what time you pick some people will be affected on the forums and what not.

Glad though that games won't be affected. I didn't think they would be but I'm glad to hear that it shouldn't be a problem.

Might be worth testing though just to be sure at some point

[edit] wow, that was pretty pain free honestly. I prefer that to having the super slow browsing that the site usually gets for a few minutes right at midnight.

Absolutely better to sacrifice a few minutes with a previously issued warning rather than having slow hours. Since it's 7 AM for me (6 AM for a few days a year until we both adapt DST) I really doubt I'll ever face this unless prompted by external reasons.

One thing I have to make clear about the warning: it is issued ONLY at 11:45 PM server time, or is it issued to all users that are around/login between 11:45 and 12:00? If it's the latter, no problem, but if it's the former it's an excessively big time frame.

geeogree : Yeah definitely. A lot of strenuous site code can be taken care of pretty quickly when there's no one using the site.

EX Palen : The warning lasts for 15 minutes up until the maintenance happens. Are you suggesting I should lower the warning time?

The warning time is a bit long especially because it doesn't affect people playing games. People need a 5 minute warning at the most if it is a forum only thing.

geeogree : It does affect the retro game room which means users wouldn't be able to navigate the RGR during that time. It just doesn't affect them if they're in the middle of playing a game.

The only reason for the 15 minute warning was in case someone went to a thread and started typing up a big response and then submitted it only to find out that their post didn't go through and was lost. I think by now though users can probably expect it to happen so I went ahead and changed it from a 15 minute warning to a 5 minute warning. The down time is actually a lot less than I originally expected so a 5 minute warning for only 2 minutes worth of down time is probably plenty.

Five minutes is more than enough. It's the usual gap I've found in other places as well. Not to mention that people sometimes don't gauge time well, and if they get a warning with too much time to react, they may relax and not care for the time.

I would understand the wide gap if the maintenance was very long, like when the Pokemon TCGO took more than a day to be back up, but if it's at most five minutes it's no big deal. If people didn't read this thread, they could consider this warning as something huge was coming. The new gap fits the situation better.

EX Palen : I may add some more things to be taken care of during this time which could potentially increase the down time but by only a few extra minutes. I have a few ideas on how I could increase the site speeds even more between 12 AM and 2 AM (server time) by executing all the queries that normally would be taken care of when a game's page is visited for the first time in a day (server time) with these daily queries.