Infrastructure Upgrade
At 5 PM PDT on Tuesday, September 23rd, Syncplicity will be performing a major scheduled upgrade. Given the size and complexity of the change, we expect the transition to take about seven hours. During this time, your computer will be unable to synchronize with Syncplicity and my.syncplicity.com will be unavailable. www.syncplicity.com and blog.syncplicity.com will continue to be available.
You can leave your client running during this time — it will automatically reconnect and resume synchronizing when we are back up. And of course, your data and account information will be kept safe & secure throughout the process.
Our team will be working throughout the night until this migration is complete — we will be twittering updates (http://twitter.com/syncplicity) along the way. Feel free to say hi if you’re online too.
For those of you wondering what we’re up to, here’s the scoop:
Behind the scenes, Syncplicity runs on some pretty serious hardware. Part of my job is to keep it running smoothly and plan for future growth.
The Syncplicity servers handle millions of requests every day. During the past few months, Syncplicity has been growing quickly and our servers have been under an increasingly high load. Even with several hardware upgrades, we’ve still had some brownouts during which some of you were unable to get the instant synchronization we built into the service. Like you, we notice when our tray icon turns gray.
A month ago, we embarked on a plan to perform a major refresh of our infrastructure to eliminate these problems and ensure ample room to grow. We’ve invested heavily in new servers and a new architecture that we’re finally ready to unveil. Our server count is tripling. Individual servers will be more powerful.
For example, as part of the upgrade, all our database servers will be moving to quad-proc, quad-core servers. Watching 16 cores in action is intense. We’re also scaling out to increase redundancy and improve reliability and scalability. This translates into a better experience for all users and as a small bonus, I know I’ll be sleeping better at night. 
Thanks,
Isaac
VP of Technology
September 23rd, 2008 at 4:49 am
Thanks for keeping us udated with clear information about how you’re moving ahead. Keep up the good work.
September 23rd, 2008 at 7:10 am
Thanks very much for your notification.
I hope that your work have good finish and we have Sync uptime asap.
Good lucks!!!
Regards,
September 23rd, 2008 at 3:04 pm
Counting down to 5 pm PT–hope all goes well. Syncplicity is, for me, a must-have service, so I appreciate your warning us before the system doesn’t go down (and we all crash the support boards with frantic messages!)
September 24th, 2008 at 8:17 am
Does not work after the infrastructure upgrade completion… My client stays offline… Even confirmed that my.syncplicity.com is inaccessible.
September 24th, 2008 at 11:27 am
Amit - try restarting your computer. Email me if you’re still having trouble.
September 28th, 2008 at 2:17 am
Doesthis mean that you will be rolling out the pay service soon? I need more than 2 GB. I wanted the 50 GB plan and am glad to pay for it….
October 3rd, 2008 at 3:08 pm
Any chance on support returning an email or responding to a forum request? I’d love to use syncplicity, but it won’t sync with my Google Docs account even though I’ve followed the instructions word-for-word. Any ideas?
October 7th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
@Roy Bragg:
Hi Roy,
I took a look at our support queue and see that the last e-mail you sent in was 7/16 with a response the following day after tracing the fact that Google is rejecting the documents as they don’t meet its conversion criteria. This is the last support message from you that I see.
Is there another message which you’ve sent and not received a response for? If so, please e-mail support again and CC me (leonard-at-.syncplicity.com) on the message.
Thanks,
Leonard
October 7th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
@ Andy:
Andy,
While Syncplicity is still in beta, it is free and has no storage limitations. The 2GB size only applies once Syncplicity goes paid. You can use it as much as you want today.
Leonard
October 15th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
You guys should look at “memcached” - it’s a mechanism that Facebook uses to help keep the intense load off of their database servers. It’s a linux server but has C# hooks so it can be called from your Windows backend.
October 15th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
Jonathan,
Thanks for the suggestion. We’ve been using memcached for a few months now — it’s great. Our database load comes from queries that aren’t very cache-able, plus a high percentage of writes. We’re working on some long term architectural changes to address this and memcached will continue to be a part of that strategy.
Thanks,
Isaac