Redacted (RED) News - Database Maintenance complete

Database maintenance is now complete. Thanks for your patience!

Hello everyone,

Some may have noticed some instability lately (site, tracker, etc.) and I'd like to take this opportunity to explain our situation and what we're going to do to fix it.

We've grown significantly in the past 2+ years of operation and we're housing a lot of data in our database. Luckily, we've planned ahead and procured a server that has the hardware to support a site of our size, but we haven't exactly made any notable changes since we've set it up and we're having performance issues on our database server, especially when we perform large queries or updates, or schema/structure changes to the various Gazelle tables.

The other large issue is a well known one with MySQL (our database server), more specifically InnoDB (our storage engine): its data file. In the early days of the site, we were growing very quickly, and we made various performance improvements/adjustments over time. Unfortunately, due to the explosive growth in peers on our site, our peer list table grew to a ridiculous size and kept cycling data, causing the ibdata1 (InnoDB data file) to grow to 86gb. We turned this feature off quickly after noticing this (a few weeks after we set things up), but it was too late; the file is now permanent and requires re-importing all of our data to remove it.

As we've added more features, and stored more data (user stats, for instance), this has eaten up a large part of our storage, requiring us to offload certain data to other servers... but we need to solve the underlying problem and unfortunately this requires a database maintenance.

We will be taking the database server offline for 1-2 hours and this will impact the site and tracker. In addition, IRC key functionality may be intermittent throughout the maintenance. We apologize for the short notice, but we attempted to workaround these issues the other day without a large downtime, but it has created some negative side effects so we must fix this before it snowballs into an even larger problem.

Thank you for your patience and please bear with us while we perform this critical database maintenance. We're committed to transparency and would rather explain things in great detail so folks are aware of why we're offline way longer than usual maintenance/downtime windows.

TL;DR - database maintenance, offline a few hours

z** & our fantastic developer team