Maintenance downtime for Atomic Forums

Over the last week or two the Atomic forums have experienced increasingly large amounts of SQL timeout errors. This has been due to the SQL database growing in size at an alarming rate. Last month alone, the forums received around 67,000 posts.

Over the last week or two the Atomic forums have experienced increasingly large amounts of SQL timeout errors. This has been due to the SQL database growing in size at an alarming rate. Last month alone, the forums received around 67,000 posts. Based on past usage statistics, this rate is doubling every two to three months and thus exacerbating the problem.

We have a code change ready to be implemented that will fix these problems in the short term. However, the current amount of traffic on the forum is such that we cannot implement any changes without experiencing timeout errors ourselves.

As such, the Atomic forums will be offline for an indeterminate (though hopefully short) time period while the fixes are implemented.

Currently, we have several options for implementing a long-term fix. However, we are yet to decide which of them is suitable given current restrictions in time, resources and other factors. We'll keep you up to date on the long-term changes as they are approved and implemented.