This has happened to me a few times in the last month or so. I click a link and get the DB Offline for Maintence page. If I go to S2ki.com again, I get right back in and am fine.

It seems to happen most often when loading a forum. Today it happened when I was done reading a post in Car Talk, I clicked the link at the bottom of the thread to return to the Car Talk forum and DBOFFLINE.

I have also seen it happen when selecting the Gallery forum link from the subscrition area of MyS2k.

It has happened fewer than 10 times in the last month and it is not really that annoying to me, just thought you might like to know.

 

The DB offline message comes up when the web server cannot connect to the database server for some reason. It's a very generic message and it can happen from time to time. The database server might be overloaded, it might have crashed (less likely) or there may be some network problem between the two.

It's something that is checked every time you try to load a page. If you get it once and then try again and it works then it's probably just very busy doing something. It rearly lasts long and should return to normal within a couple of minutes. There are a few operations that place a very high load on the database but they are short-lived and infrequent.

If you get the message repeatedly on every page load attempt then it's more likely due to a failure of some kind (server crash) and can take a bit of time to fix. I generally won't know about failures for at least 10 or 15 minutes unless I'm online and see it myself. If it's easy to fix then it shouldn't take more than 45 minutes to an hour to fix.

 

Thanks.

 

It's usually when I am merging threads