University site down for maintenance almost every week for 2-3 days over the past 6 months !

chrislongros

chrislongros

It is not exactly a "university" site, but an american organization for graduate applications. It is a very important system used by thousands of graduates across the world but in order to follow the application process I had to always check the announcements of maintenance and down time!!

I wonder what kind of servers they are running?
If their systems had FreeBSD servers would it be the same ?
 
There have been recent security updates for OpenSSH, OpenSSL, PHP, MySQL, curl, etc., etc., etc. so depending on the resources behind the site (and IF it was using Open Source Software) some downtime is fairly inevitable (assuming the downtime is down to server updates).

Scheduled downtime is better than unplanned. e.g. https://mashable.com/article/faa-grounded-flights-deleted-files

Given enough resources you could aim for closer to 100% uptime.

And sometimes the changes made to make things (e.g. uptime) "better" actually make things worse e.g.

 
As it's recurring downtime every week, it sounds more likely to be some kind of slow backup or synchronization job.

If the former, probably a 100GB+ database full of blobs containing PDF copies of every exam, assignment, report etc dating back to 1970, being backed up with mysqldump or pg_dump, tar-zipped onto some Windows network drive over the SMB protocol.

If the latter, perhaps a sync between two or more database systems. Probably using the state-of-the-art Airflow Python library with Pandas and machine learning for proper data engineering, written by a team of contractors from the university's favourite consultancy company.
 
dbdemon said:
As it's recurring downtime every week, it sounds more likely to be some kind of slow backup or synchronization job.
Click to expand...
I missed the part about 2-3 days downtime every week - that is odd.

Don't think the operating system choice would be a key factor here - something else is wrong. Could be time-consuming backups as you say, dbdemon.
 
Is someone pay for the web-hosting/web-dev/support?
Just try to ask them about a source of downtime.
In my opinion, someone just studying "how to support the web-site" and use your site as a playground.
Usually hobby-sites on home-servers may have better uptime than you specified.
Experienced web-devs in cooperation with experienced web-admins can easily provide site with overall downtime less than 1 day per year.
But you should to understand than better results require more and more money and a lot of hard work.
Nowadays we have a lot of web-technologies to have a site with 100% uptime. You just should to hire experts and give them a wagon of money.
 
You may have success with checking which courses are running at that time and having a good look at whatever "web-dev" course is in that time frame. Maybe some teacher uses the web server as his playground for the students. In that case, you need to see if a kind word or a big stick is in order.
 
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