Hey SpiceHeads,
We wanted to let you know that we have some maintenance going on. This maintenance will not take down the service nor have any associated downtime.
WHEN?
We plan to start this process on May 11, 2021, at approximately 11 AM CT (16:00 UTC), and we anticipate this taking up to 12 hours. It may be faster than that because we know I like to pad my maintenance notices to be on the safe side, but it could actually take that time.
WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
We will be updating our search and analytics engine to a newer version.
WHAT DOES IT AFFECT?
During the first half of this maintenance period, you shouldn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. But, come the second half starting at roughly 5 PM CT (22:00 UTC), certain elements may have older, out-of-date information until after that area of the Community has been reindexed. For example, you may see groups that are missing topics in their listing or have out-of-date, incorrect information. This could also affect listings and directories for How-Tos, Scripts, IT Service Providers, etc.
HOW DO I KEEP UP?
To keep up-to-date with our progress or any changes, make sure to subscribe to this topic or keep an eye on our Status Page .
Let us know if you have any questions and thank you for your patience and understanding as we update and upgrade our Community.
39 Spice ups
dimforest
(ᴅɪᴍꜰᴏʀᴇsᴛ)
2
Can you fix the bug where people don’t mark Best Answers and just take the info and run?
Also - ban @brodyweber
<3
20 Spice ups
" WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
We will be updating our search and analytics engine to a newer version."
You mean so it works instead of just being an annoying cosmetic on the site?
I second dimforest in his proposal. Though i have no idea why we would want to ban Bweber93 but i am all for supporting a good cause.
@dimforest @brodyweber
7 Spice ups
I am not sure there is a fix SW can do to get someone to not just take the info, run, and not mark BA. But if there IS a fix, then I am all for it.
Out of curiosity, why does it take 12 hours to do the upgrade? I’m just curious as to what takes so long? I’d love to know a bit more about SW’s architecture.
I also note the comment on padding - in cases like this padding is definitely a best parazctice - so no problem!
2 Spice ups
pfft, I’m the well behaved child, you’re the kid who sets off fireworks in the toilet just for fun that the parents really want to abandon somewhere.
3 Spice ups
I don’t know if we can “fix” that issue with users (because we know members will always mark a Best Answer, right?!) who do drive-bys… but there are probably things we can do to minimize the issue some.
As for this helping with site search, ultimately, yes. This update itself doing it? No, not really. It’s a blocker on us getting there since we use a much older version and we need to get on a newer one for multiple reasons (one of those so we can get better usage out of it, though).
Why does it take 12 hours? It shouldn’t take that long (but it might!), I do like to pad the times given to me by the team to be on the safe side since we all know that sometimes production can be a bit special 
That said, the first half of the maintenance will be migrating each area in “Community” (and I use quotes because there are actually multiple services that we attribute to Community) to use the updated version. As each one is accomplished and validated, we move to the next one. After that is all done, the second half of that migration is reindexing all of those. I think it’s safe to say we don’t have a small amount of data (for example, think of how many topics and replies there are… all of them). So a lot of that time is really due to the sheer wealth of data we have.
Will it actually take 12 hours… we’ll see. I wanted to say Soon™ but that seemed a bit too ambiguous
4 Spice ups
As Sean said, we have a lot of data! The bulk of the maintenance time is snapshotting our data and then migrating it over to a new cluster (this part takes a lot of time).
Then we will do a Community release to switch to the new cluster (this part is fast).
Afterwards, we’ll reindex the data to gain back anything we lost (this part is also slow).
1 Spice up
" As Sean said, we have a lot of data!"
Most of that is my spam.
2 Spice ups
haha, we know a fair share of it is my, ahem, images…
1 Spice up
Thanks for the heads up! This will explain things later when I am yelling at my Internet on here. lol
2 Spice ups
if you just skip indexing all the posts made by Dimforest, it might shave off an hour.
8 Spice ups
Just FYI, we’re starting phase 2 now!
2 Spice ups
Hi all, we’re getting close to the end but we did notice an issue where topics are given a (much) lower priority than blogs when using full search. Example:
~~ https://community.spiceworks.com/search?query=pure%20capsaicin ~~
It is working in Quick Search (where you use the search option in the nav but don’t hit enter) so we’ll look to see what’s going on in full search.
Update: Nevermind, Cat figured it out!
1 Spice up
I updated the Release Notes but failed to update here (facepalm). The updates are live and while there are a few minor cleanup issues, it went off really well. Even more so because we went from a version 2.x to 5.x (so a big jump).
TL;DR - It’s done!
2 Spice ups
