Game Pages were Down

Most game pages and some search results pages were broken this weekend. The site is back to normal now.

When some sales volume calculations ran on Friday night, they created a database error which broke these pages. We have monitoring set up to text me whenever the site goes down, but it didn't notice these particular errors. I've added extra monitoring to try and catch future problems like this before they inconvenience everyone.

Sorry for the trouble.

Emergency Site Maintenance

This evening, a hard drive in our main web server failed. It took the hosting company about 40 minutes to replace the problem hardware. It took us about another 20 minutes to repair the file system and get everything working again like normal. The site was down for about 1 hour 10 minutes altogether.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

Server Upgrade

VGPC was down for about 40 minutes tonight while we upgraded our database server. All the historic price data was pushing the old instance to its limit. Everything's back to normal now with a shiny new server with 50% more storage.

For those that are curious, we currently have about 64 million price points including 8.5 million sales records. We add about 96,000 new price points and/or sales each day.

Unexpected Down Time

One of the servers that runs VGPC experienced some hardware problems a couple nights ago. Attempts to fix the server failed causing four hours of down time this morning (you may have seen the server maintenance message).

We've now migrated the affected code to a new server and everything appears to be working correctly. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Outage Overnight

VGPC was down for about 6 hours last night (from 12:11 am to 6:12 am Mountain time). Our database server ran out of disk space and stopped servicing requests. I guess storing 27 million video game price points and 4 million sales records takes more space than we thought.

Server Outage

VGPC was down for 12 hours today from about 4 am to 4 pm (Mountain time). It's back up and running now. I spent most of the day nursing a flu so I didn't notice the text message about the server being down. Sorry for any inconvenience.