Just a note to say that some of the tasks of today's Monday maintenance will be postponed to tomorrow afternoon (UTC). This includes a restart of the backend software to load in some modifications to the database tables to better allow us to track when workunits end.

The service will be down for around 45 seconds while the changes are written to disk.

The service will be down for around 45 seconds while the changes are written to disk.

Outrageously long! :)

Sometimes I'm really really happy that there is no service level agreement on this thing. Those 99.9999% contract holders would have been screaming for compensation by now =)

The backend software changes applied cleanly and the first few test results are looking good too. Over the next few weeks we will be monitoring for adverse effects on the performance.

On a semi-related note: As a bonus feature, the compression quality of the small preview images in the gallery was also improved and they now have almost no visible JPEG artifacts. Here's a scaled up example to show it (image on the left used 1KB, new thumbnail uses 6KB but looks better):

Not all browsers will see this change right away for old sessions; it should kick in for new sessions in all browsers, though.