- Site maintenance will be happening from Thursday 11th September 21:00 UTC until Friday 12th September 14:00 UTC
- We will be rebuilding all our search indexes
- While this is happening, search results may be empty, search functionality will not work, and some widgets may show no results or incomplete results
- As the maintenance proceeds, search results will start to work but not for all types. There will be a period where you will get incomplete results from search, or where tabbed widgets work for some types but not for others
- We expect the site to be fully functional by Friday 12th September 14:00 UTC, but if we have problems it is possible that it will continue into Friday night or Saturday morning
- More detail below:
At some point on Thursday night going into Friday morning UK time, we will be replacing our search server with an entirely new setup. There will be no functional changes as a result of this, we're moving our Solr search services over to a new architecture and the codebase will remain unchanged.
When we move servers, we will lose all our search indexes, so we will need to recreate our search index. This is a standard procedure that we do occasionally after a major upgrade, and it takes between 8 and 36 hours to complete.
We will initiate that search reindex late on Thursday night UK time so we can monitor it going into Friday. The site will remain up, but the search function will be unavailable, and any of our widgets that rely on search will have issues. This includes many of the tabbed widgets that exist on the home page and on landing pages such as the raspberry pi page.
We've done everything we can to limit the impact on the membership and would usually run this sort of job over the weekend, but in this case with it being new architecture we are erring on the side of caution. We've done everything we can to mitigate the risk, but there is no test like production, and we'd prefer to be sitting and watching it happen as it goes live so that we can intervene should something go wrong.
We thank you for your patience and understanding!
element14 Community DevOps Team.