LiveJournal was unavailable for 2 hours and 45 minutes yesterday, Tuesday, while the social network migrated to a new server facility.

The migration seems to have started just after 5 p.m. CET (11 a.m. US EST), which is when the site went down.

Directly following the migration, the website was significantly slower than normal for some time, something which was also explained as a side effect of the migration on the LiveJournal status page:

LiveJournal was down today for a period of time due to migration to a new server facility. We’re back now. As the site comes back up pages may load slowly; this is expected and should resolve within the next few hours. If you are seeing this page instead of the normal www.livejournal.com site, then your local machine or DNS server is caching old information. Please try rebooting your machine to fix the problem. If that does not work, you should either contact your ISP or wait for their DNS servers to get updated.

It took approximately eight hours before the website’s performance was back to normal.

LiveJournal normally has excellent availability and has a 99.87% uptime so far in 2008 (a total of 10 hours of downtime). Before the downtime yesterday the site had a 99.90% uptime (reaching the coveted “three nines”). It will be interesting to see how LiveJournal will perform in their new data center.

The data in this article is from the Pingdom uptime monitoring service. The load time in the graph refers to the time it took to contact the site and download the HTML page only, not including images or other external elements.

Google’s App Engine suffered from increased data access latency and errors yesterday, including problems serving applications. According to TechCrunch, the problems lasted for approximately six hours.

From the App Engine status page:

On July 2nd, all applications experienced increased error rate and latency with read and write Datastore and memcache operations, as well as some serving errors. Datastore access and serving have been fully restored as of 12:25 PM PDT.

What happened yesterday exposed a couple of interesting weaknesses for App Engine.

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We have exciting news to share. As you may have noticed, we made some changes to the Pingdom website yesterday, and the main thing we added was a new account type that many of you are going to love: Pingdom Free.

Now, for the first time ever, you can use Pingdom for free. We’re not talking about a free trial, but a completely free account that you can use for as long as you like, no strings attached.

In other words, you are getting a professional uptime monitoring service for free. With the Pingdom service, you’ll be the first to know when your site goes down.

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If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ll know that we love everything geeky, and we have often put together themed galleries that appeal to tech geeks like ourselves.

Here is a collection of some of the geekiest galleries that have come and gone on this blog.

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Wordpress.com, the popular blogging service from Automattic, has some interesting growth statistics posted on its website. Among other things, there is a graph showing how many new blogs are created on the service each day.

Based on the graphs that Automattic provides us with, it’s actually not that difficult to estimate how much Wordpress.com will grow in 2009. Which, of course, was a temptation we couldn’t resist!

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Operating systems on supercomputers used to be custom-made affairs, but this has changed. These days, Linux has become a popular choice for supercomputers. But how popular? You may be surprised.

Top500.org maintains a list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. A new list was published yesterday (it happens twice a year), so we took the opportunity to go through the list and find out what OS the top 20 supercomputers are using.

It took some work, but the results are interesting.

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