Upcoming scheduled maintenance for MySQL 5.5 upgrades (completed)

Over the next ten days (February 7-15, 2014), we’ll be upgrading the MySQL database on all of our servers from version 5.1.72 to 5.5.35. The upgrade requires that each Web server be taken offline for two minutes, causing brief scheduled “downtime”.

Because the process requires some human time and effort to upgrade each server, we’ll be performing the maintenance on five different weekend nights between 11 PM and midnight Pacific time, upgrading one-fifth of the servers each night:

• Friday, February 7: servers ending in digits “9” and “8” (completed)
• Saturday, February 8: servers ending in digits “7” and “6” (completed)
• Sunday, February 9: servers ending in digits “5” and “4” (completed)
• Friday, February 14: servers ending in digits “3” and “2” (completed)
• Saturday, February 15: servers ending in digits “1” and “0” (completed)

So, for example, the “web08” server will be updated on February 7, and the “web10” server will be updated on February 15. This page explains how to find which server a site is on.

Although each server’s upgrade will happen at some point between 11 PM and midnight Pacific time, the Web server will only be unavailable for two minutes at some point during that hour, not the whole hour. During that two minute period, attempts to load pages from the Web server will “time out”.

We’ll post a banner on all the pages of our site while the maintenance is happening. E-mail service will not be interrupted in any way.

We apologize for the inconvenience this causes. We try to avoid any interruption in service, but the MySQL upgrade is required for security reasons (the older 5.1 series will soon no longer be supported), and cannot be done without brief downtime.

After the upgrade, customers should notice no difference in how their site works. Any software that worked properly with MySQL 5.1.72 should work the same with MySQL 5.5.35.