We will have 4 hours of downtime on a Sunday in the next month. It is most likely to be on Sunday 3rd of April from midnight to 4 am but we will know a firm date later this month. As usual the best way to keep up to date with our server status and planned upgrades is through www.pkbstatus.com.
We are doing this as part of a big upgrade of our infrastructure. Part of the upgrade is to allow us to do more such upgrades in the future without needing to bring down the servers. So this should never happen again.
The main reason is to make our servers run faster. Earlier in the year we mentioned that improving performance is top of our list in the PKB development roadmap. This upgrade is to the software of our patient demographics database. After that we can move this database from hard disk to RAM. This means finding patients’ records will be faster and more efficient, which is critical for regions storing the records of over a million people on PKB servers as the professionals in these regions need to search through and add to millions of records quickly.
We are sorry for the inconvenience this will cause, and thank you for your patience with us. If you have any questions about this upgrade or anything else please contact us.