Raining and Pouring - Today's On Chip (Tomorrow too!)

The underlying cause of today's outage is still a real head-scratcher.  We pay people at Microsoft and Dell a ton of money for equipment and software that should never slow down out-of-the-blue, but that's pretty much what happened today to one of our database machines.  It is a very simple server too - nothing fancy at all in terms of configuration - and has been rock solid for several years.  For reasons that only Microsoft or Dell would know, it simply slowed to a crawl today.

Well, regardless of the underlying cause, it's my job to prevent these problems.  Clearly today's outage was unacceptable.

Because of today's problem, all StockCharts.com members are getting today's service (and tomorrow's as well) on me.  All active memberships should already have had 2 additional days of service added to their expiration date.

As I've said before, our goal is to be 100% reliable 100% of the time.  We are upgrading "old reliable" to newer, faster servers with newer database software.  After that is complete, we will continue to look for ways to prevent this from happening again.

Happy Monday!