We’ve installed MySQL and PHP 5 security updates. Customers should not notice any changes; the updates just fix several security issues in PHP 5 and MySQL.
The updates were performed in such a way that new Web server connections were delayed during the 30 seconds or so that PHP and MySQL were unavailable on each server. That should mean that as far as scripts on your Web site were concerned, there was zero downtime.
Here’s an obscure thing we spent some time on today that doesn’t affect our customers, but might be useful to someone else searching the Internet. The problem was a MySQL database table that, as far as we can tell, worked perfectly… except that it shows this message when we run CHECK TABLE:
Table upgrade required. Please do "REPAIR TABLE `users`" to fix it!
We applied a MySQL security update tonight. The version number remains 5.0.32, and customers should not notice any changes; the update just fixes several security issues.
The update was performed in such a way that new Web server connections were delayed during the 30 seconds or so that MySQL was unavailable on each server. That should mean that as far as scripts on your Web site were concerned, there was zero MySQL downtime.
We’ve installed several software upgrades on our servers. First of all, updates to our new Webmail system over the last few days fix:
These fixes solve all the bugs that we know of in the new Webmail system (although we have plenty of feature requests that we’re working on). If you’re still using the old system, now’s the time to switch, or to let us know why you’re using the old system so we can address that.
In addition, we also upgraded the following software on our servers Monday night:
As always, let us know if you have any questions or concerns.
We’ve finished upgrading all our Web hosting servers to use MySQL 5.0.32, as we explained in this earlier post. The total time that MySQL databases were unavailable averaged about ten minutes per server. Again, we regret any downtime — this was unavoidable for such a major upgrade.
You should not notice any difference in how your site operates. In the unlikely event you have any problems, please contact us by opening a ticket so we can help.
This coming Saturday (August 4th), we’ll be upgrading the MySQL database software on all our servers from version 4.1.11 to version 5.0.32 (plus appropriate security updates). MySQL 5 adds many features that customers have requested, and some Web site scripts now require it.
The upgrade will take place between 11:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time (the times will be slightly different for each server). We’ll be making a full backup of all databases on each server before the upgrade, and as a result, customers should expect MySQL to be unavailable for about 15 minutes during this period. In addition, large databases may be slow for several minutes after the upgrade, because MySQL automatically converts databases to the new version format the first time they are accessed, which can be time consuming.
If your site doesn’t use MySQL databases, it won’t be affected at all. If it does, you almost certainly won’t see any effects other than the 15 minute outage. That said, we do recommend checking your scripts for MySQL 5 compatibility.
A couple of times in the last week, we’ve seen one of our MySQL database servers have an unusually high number of connections. That’s a serious issue: If there are too many connections to a MySQL server, customer scripts won’t be able to connect to a database, so we’ve spent some time looking at the cause and fixing it.
