listnook will be down for maintenance for about two hours when this post is 22 hours old (10pm PST, 1am EST, 6am GMT, 5pm EDT)

See [here](http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=1&day=26&year=2010&hour=22&min=0&sec=0&p1=224&sort=0) for the time in your area. **What will we be doing?** We will be performing part two of the maintenance we started [three weeks ago](http://www.listnook.com/tb/amumr). We will be upgrading memcached and memcachedb, and their supporting system libraries. It turns out we are two major revisions behind, and we'd like to take advantage of some of the new improvements, like the binary protocol. **Why?** We hope this will further enhance site performance, and make page load times even faster! **I thought you are "in the cloud". Why can't you do it with no downtime?** The cloud is not a magic bullet, and we are c**** and lazy. We could in theory bring up a bunch of new machines that are already upgraded to replace the machines we will be upgrading, but it turns out that moving the data would be a big pain. So instead we will just take the site down for a bit to do the upgrade in place. The beauty of the cloud, however, is that we'll have a backup instance already booted and configured if something goes wrong. **Ok, but why do you have to take the site down?** One of the things that we are upgrading are the permacaches, which use memcachedb (see previous blog post). Because of the way we access them, they are currently a single point of failure for us. We hope to resolve that in the future, but in the meantime, we can't take one of them down without breaking the site, so we'll just take them all down at once. **Fun fact**: Since we took the site down 3 weeks ago, page views are already up about 15% Lesson: Site faster == more traffic :) **TL;DR** User [thepensivepoet](/user/thepensivepoet) has provided a handy [graphic](http://i.imgur.com/HzohA.gif) to help you understand what's happening.