This Saturday, October 23rd, starting at about 2 PM Pacific, we will be migrating all of our primary sites from the Corvallis, OR datacenter to the New York, NY datacenter.

Please be advised that this is a major move, and while we will do everything we can to prevent major service interruptions (largely with a read-only site mode we’re introducing), there may be a few hours of unavoidable downtime.

This move is good news, though:

• NYC is approximately 80 milliseconds closer to Europe, which is where a significant portion of our audience arrives from. And of course dramatically closer to the rest of the east coast of the USA.
• The Peer 1 internet network infrastructure should be faster.
• The servers all have twice as much memory (16 GB web tier, 64 GB database tier) and their CPUs are one generation ahead of what we have in Corvallis (Core 2 vs Core i7 class).
• There’s a lot more of … uh, everything.

At worst this NYC configuration will be the same speed overall — but much more robust. At best, you should notice 100 to 150 millisecond improvement in response time on every single page.

As always, you can read real time updates and details about the move on blog.serverfault.com.

update: this migration is now complete. We have a few very minor things left to clean up, but for the most part everything should be working as before.

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