[General] New Backup System

We have received a small number of issues being raised about slowness and sluggishness of accounts during the late night and early morning hours. This is due to the backup process that is running on all of our servers. Our backup process runs during these hours because it makes more sense to run the backups during the time when the servers are less active. The servers receive fewer visitors during the overnight hours than they do during the daytime hours.

All of our servers run a nightly backup process to back up accounts. Most of the servers split this task up throughout the week in different methods. We don’t specifically advertise our backup system because we feel that in doing so users will be less inclined to keep their own backups. It is always a good idea to have your own personal, up-to-date, backup of your account! The backups that we created are intended to be use in disaster recovery, for example a hard drive failure. But again, you really should not depend on us as your sole backup, you should have a personal backup copy of your website stored on your personal computer.

With all of that being said, I have made some adjustments to the way that the backup process runs on all of our servers. I am going to try out these changes for about a week and see if there are any noticeable performance gains or any problems.

Scott