Performance of the websites hosted on Topaz has increased over the last two weeks with a variety of patches ported to the production servers. We still have an outstanding memory problem that requires a restart of the Topaz applications three times a day (these restarts usually occur around midnight, 8am and 4pm with a duration of less than 10 minutes). I feel that we're close to diagnosing the memory problem which is the last performance hurdle.

We're waiting for the Topaz developers to finish two outstanding tickets before we create a new release candidate (RC 0.8.2.2 for those that are counting). This release candidate will contain all of the patches, even better caching features and XSL/CSS bug fixes. We'll test the release candidate later this week and the production servers will run on this RC no later than Friday, March 28.

We also have a patch for search and will test the patch tomorrow. If testing goes well, then we will be able to place basic and advanced search back on the journal websites by the end of the week.

And now for something completely different.... We had a problem with one of our production servers Friday morning which caused an extended downtime. The Fedora server mysteriously stopped all network traffic and then rebooted. Russ and Josh are bringing the servers down for diagnostic tests and maintenance from 9-9:30pm PST. During this time, the journal websites will display the "undergoing site maintenance" page.