About a dozen times over the past month, I've noticed that if I hit "submit" on a post at 11:18 or 11:19 PM California time, the site appears to lock up. I can browse to other sites on the internet, check e-mail, etcetera, but if I try to open a new browser window and go to the NAM homepage during that 1-2 minute period, it won't load either.

 

That is about the time our backups start (2AM on the East coast). Unfortunately because of the database size, galleries, etc. even a differential backup takes some time now and loads the machine for a bit.

Mark

 

Thanks - I figured it was something like that. The delay/lockup is much too short to represent the total time spent backing up, but perhaps the backup routine has to momentarily "freeze" the site while resetting file attributes after the backup is complete.

Since you're doing differential backups daily rather than incremental backups, how often do you do a complete backup in order to reset the differential size to zero?

 

That's something I leave to our sysadmin I believe it is once a week.

Mark

 

Funny - just ran into this last night. Thanks for the heads up Scott.

 

Mark,

Do you handle your backups locally, or does the hosting company do it? I've noticed that even after NAM moved over to the new server, the site still locks up tight whenever I try to submit a new post, browse for new posts, or even bring up the site's homepage between 11:18 pm and 11:20 pm. Tonight was especially bad - I got several 503 errors while trying to load/refresh pages, and the "lockup period" lasted much longer this time - all the way to 11:25 pm.

 

I had the same issues with 503 errors.

 

If NAM is run anything like a normal server maintenance tasks are automated and the time it takes to run depends on the amount of data that needs to be processed. I might suggest to Mark now that it seems more people are having issues with when things are being backed up that the schedule me augmented so that it runs later at night.

 

Yep...the time you mention is when daily backups are running. I'll see if they can be pushed an hour or two later into the night. At some point though everyone needs to get some sleep so we can do backups and be ready for the next day

Mark

 

It's no big deal - I was just surprised to have the exact same problem at the exact same time of day, even after the switch to the new hosting company/server.

But I guess if you're handling the backups locally, rather than the hosting company doing it, it makes sense that the schedule would be the same, regardless of who's actually hosting the site.