*poke poke* Is this thing on?

Oh good!

Not sure if I missed something, but was that a planned downtime for the site? And is there somewhere not directly hosted on RPOL itself that gives notifications of such things? I know that we here are notoriously social media unfriendly for a variety of reasons (not being tracked is good!) but if there's a resource out there to be kept in the loop, I certainly want in!

Indeed. It was rather frustrating to see the site and the beta, and everything else associated was down with no information available.
Made me think back to the dark days about a decade ago when it was down for weeks! :(

Nope, AFAIK it was not a scheduled downtime.  So no advance notification could be given.

In reply to bigbadron (msg # 3):

Thanks for the info BBR!

Backups caused a bottleneck which caused all the web requests to queue up.  Then there were so many queued web requests that the server ran out of memory and crashed.  Sorry about that.  Have tweaked the backups further and will look into how I can limit the number of queued web requests (getting some "server too busy" messages is a lot better than the entire server going down).

So an effort to save the site from going down permanently, caused the site to go down.
Yup, that'd be irony for you right there....

How many people (like me) have this site as their home page ?

I have a question: do the backups happen regularly around 10 PM CET? Because I tend to be making my posts at that hour and it's not the first time the site was inaccesible (usually for minutes, not hours) for me then.

Hey at least they do backups. There's nothing worse than someone saying "I just accidently deleted all records from table {insert imprtant table name here}. Do we have a backup?" To which the response is blank sad faces. It happens much more often than you think.

Here's a couple of threads that are probably related, from earlier in the year.

link to a message in another game
link to a message in another game