CUNY Academic Commons

Hi Matt,

Thank you for the quick response. We notice the occasional downtime and use the Jetpack plugin to monitor downtime.

Thank you, your team and IT at the Graduate Center for all that you are doing for the Academic Commons.

Best,
David dos Santos

Hi Matt,

Thanks so much for your response. This was a follow up to a ticket we submitted a couple of months ago because we were noticing fairly frequent ACERT site downtime when the Commons was not down. Boone had asked us to follow up about additional downtime closer to the time when it occurred. Though the Saturday downtime may have been related to the Commons downtime, I know that this is not always the case because I have successfully accessed the Commons other times when the ACERT site was down. So we just want to make sure that nothing funky is going on with our site. It was down again for about an hour around 6 pm yesterday and I got the error message "Error establishing a database connection." This was the first time I have seen an error message - usually when we receive a Jetpack report that the site is down, the ACERT site can't be accessed and I see nothing on the screen.

We're really happy hosting our site on the Commons, and just want to make sure that there's not some solveable problem with the ACERT site.

Thanks!

Gina

Matt Gold wrote:

Hi David,

We received reports of the Commons being down on Saturday night and notified IT at the Graduate Center, which hosts the Commons. We were grateful that IT was able to respond off-hours and get the site up and running soon. To my knowledge, we were not down for nearly as long as three hours, but it is not outside the realm of possibility. Did you receive any reports from users or experience this yourself?

We strive, through our partnership with IT at the GC, to provide consistent uptime, and we have great partners in IT. Still, , the Commons goes down on occasion as a result of malicious attacks and so we are unable to promise the kind of uptime that you might get if you hosted your site with a commercial service. That may be something for ACERT to consider if our current service is unsatisfactory -- though, again, we are always working to improve and thank you for your patience.

Best,

Matt
Director, CUNY Academic Commons

Thanks so much, Gina and David. I actually think that the Commons was down briefly on Saturday.

Sometimes, the Commons is the victim of DOS attacks, which can overwhelm the maximum number of MySQL connections allowed on the server and lead to the Db connection error you note. At such times, it's possible that the error message could show very briefly but then resolve on refresh. If there is a significant problem, it is likely that both ACERT and the Commons are down.

I'd find it strange if ACERT was down but the Commons was up. If you find that to be the case, please refresh both sites a few times to ensure and report to us on your experiences.

Thanks so much for hosting ACERT on the Commons!!