For the next month or so, we will be rolling out a series of changes to various parts of the Tracker server architecture, including moving to a Memcached distributed cache for certain requests, cookie based sessions, switching from Mongrel to Passenger, splitting the very large history table, etc.

We’re doing this to improve performance, and eliminate potential scaling issues as our traffic grows. To reduce risk, we’ll introduce these changes in separate updates, once a week.

These updates will occur on Wednesdays at 7:30pm PDT (including tonight), and last under an hour each. If there are any long running migrations needed, we’ll plan them for weekends, or handle them incrementally, to avoid any extended down times.

We understand that these week night outages are inconvenient to many of you, especially in Asia. We apologize in advance, and will try and keep the updates as brief as possible.