It seems like an age ago that I was here writing about our plans for stability through server clustering. It was a long time ago, a much longer time than I was anticipating or hoping, but we’re as ready as we’ll ever be to roll it out.

As a part of the original announcement I did say that we’d probably have some substantial downtime as we moved the site databases over to our new architecture. That downtime (perhaps one of a few planned downtimes) will be tomorrow. All day tomorrow in fact.

All is not lost, however. It’s not going to be a total downtime of all the sites, but rather this downtime will simply be for the forums. You might now be saying “ooooh that’s fine, I don’t use the forums”. You probably do use the forums, you just don’t know it, as the forums are used for file commenting, new user registrations and uploading new mods to the site. So during this downtime not only will you not be able to use the forums themselves, but you won’t be able to post new comments/topics, add new mods to any Nexus site or create a new account. You will still be able to browse the Nexus sites for mods and download as normal.

We’re expecting this downtime to start around about 10am GMT tomorrow and last all day, and then we’ll likely be spending most of Friday fixing problems that might arise and tweaking everything for performance. So it could be a rocky few days coming up, but the long term benefits should outweigh the short-term inconveniences.

Once the forums are working on the cluster we’ll be moving the larger Nexus sites over. Our smaller sites are already using the cluster (anything with less files than Dragon Age/Fallout 3). These sites might require some downtime but we’ll inform you before any work is scheduled to start.

Fingers crossed.