I’d like to open a discussion on the best practices for performing core maintenance tasks on a Discourse instance while minimizing or eliminating downtime. Tasks like changing critical resource settings (e.g., UNICORN_WORKERS, DISCOURSE_SIDEKIQ_WORKERS, DISCOURSE_DB_POOL) or applying major updates …

If you have a two container install, the new container builds while the old one runs. Downtime is just the amount of time it takes to launch the new container. The only issue is that you need enough ram to build a container while the other runs. Move from standalone container to separate web and da…

can you have two data containers on failover? [image] pfaffman: I usually move a new vm. do you use a usually have separate vm for data?

[image] Ethsim2: can you have two data containers on failover? Discourse is so stable this is pretty unnecessary for most installs (but I guess you might consider it for very high availability requirements or if you are hosting others?!) I don’t think I’ve had a single outage in 7 years due …

I move to a new vm when doing a big reconfiguration. It’s possible to run a PostgreSQL mirror, but it’s a lot of work

Read replica would be better no?

How to Perform Major Discourse Maintenance with Minimal Downtime?

Product Support Self-hosting

pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman) September 6, 2025, 12:41am 7

Yeah! Replica! That’s the word they use. And then if the other one dies you can hot swap to the replica.

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How to Perform Major Discourse Maintenance with Minimal Downtime?

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