The server will be shutdown for as long as 1 hour beginning at 7 am GMT on January 9. That's typically the slowest time of the day on YWS, so few users should be affected. The shutdown is to do some database maintenance that can only be done when the database is taken offline.
Reason and technical discussion follows
This will address some of the ongoing server issues that we've been having lately. A large number of these issues were related to the flashchat that we brought back for a few days. The flashchat is poorly designed and is thus a memory hog. Since the YWS server doesn't have enough memory as it is, the flashchat exacerbated the problem. But, getting rid of it doesn't solve the problem entirely.
Right now, activity is up. Way up. Yesterday, we had over 26,000 pageviews in a single day without anything special going on. That means activity on YWS has already returned to the levels of 2011, which was the heyday of this site. Activity also currently shows no signs of flattening out or decreasing.
So with rising levels of activity, I need to do more database optimization. Part of this optimization will involve deleting information from the database that is duplicated elsewhere or no longer needed. For example, the old literary forums will be removed as everything contained in them is now duplicated in the literary area. There's also information in the database for the old poetry and short story sections (the ones that contained published works by authors such as Emily Dickinson and Rudyard Kipling), and that stuff can be removed as we're currently not using it. Please note, there are multiple backups of everything just in case (there's even backups for restoring this site to November 15, 2004!).
But there's also a corrupted file in the database that needs to be repaired. This corrupted file doesn't harm anything, but it's printing hundreds of error messages every second. That's a big resource drain on the server, and the only way to fix it is to delete it. But if I delete it while the site is running, then all information on the site will be deleted as well. It's kind of an important file (google "ibdata1 file" if you're interested in knowing what it is).
However, the above is still not going to fix everything. The only way to completely fix the server issues is to purchase more ram. At the moment, there's no money for that. But I'm hoping that I'll be able to double the size of the server within the next few months. Once I'm able to do that, there'll be no server issues at all for a very long time (at least a month!).
