As you’ve likely noticed, we added more servers last week and separated the databases that serve the Forums and other ECA sites from GamePolitics, which is presently on dedicated machines. What we didn’t anticipate was that the growth curve would accelerate. The ESA’s bashing of both GP and the ECA has driven a lot of new and apparently sustained traffic to the sites, rallied consumers to join the ECA and as a result we’re maxed-out again on server capacity… already. So our IT folks will be hard at it again today to add servers and increase capacity – this time anticipating a steeper curve – and we hope that you won’t notice the work being performed in the background.
Dennis did allude to a possible JT-related story today and if it gets picked up by Digg and Slashdot again, before we have a chance to make the upgrades, we could experience slowness or even error messages that make it look like the site is down. In fact, GP hasn’t been down at all, it’s just that we’re not serving all of the requests. So in the event that this happens, we just ask that you be patient and re-fresh.
Since the forums and other ECA-related sites are on separate servers now, you will have access to them in this worst-case scenario. Thanks in advance for your patience and support.