In a typical Murhpy’s Law fashion, as soon as we posted the previous blog update about the connectivity issues, we figured out the problem and fixed it, so I believe this issue is now behind us and the new servers will start acting like they’re supposed to – healthy, fast, and uninterrupted.
Not to bore you with the details, but the problem was related to the memory swap issue – the server wasn’t giving our scripts enough memory to run, which caused the virtual memory to swap in/out like there’s no tomorrow, which at some point caused the entire server to crash. Restarting the server would just start the whole process from scratch, until the memory swapping clogged the server again. The fix turned out to be a one-line server configuration change, but this one-line made all the difference in the world. Now, our server memory charts are looking great (again), hence we strongly believe that this issue has been fixed for good.
We are very sorry for the couple of these brief service interruptions you had in the past two days. While we are very proud of the stability of our service (during the 2 years and 4 months that LibGuides has been running, the amount of planned and unplanned downtime was less than 5 hours, total), the Internet connectivity issues and the server issues do occur from time to time. Rest assured that we take these very seriously, and have processes and procedures in place to deal with these problems as soon as they occur. If/when our servers go down, we are the first to know about it because our blackberries get notified immediately – straight from the data center, and the tech springys spring into action (no pun intended :)) immediately. All this happens before you even realize that your LibGuides are down – we are already in touch with the data center and are working on figuring out how to get things back online.
In any case, onwards and upwards, and please let us know if you have any questions or concerns – we are always available at support {at} springshare dot com (that goes to our blackberries, too ;))