The pool is having a hardware issue.  It will be back up in about 30 - 45 minutes while I replace the failed part.

I apologize for the downtime.  I noticed a problem with the MySQL database and in the process of diagnosing it, I decided to reboot the server which turned out to be a bad idea.

After the server came back up, I continued diagnosing the problem and identified two separate issues causing slow queries on the DB.  I've completely fixed one I believe, the other one is related to the user stats in the API.

I need to do some code rewriting for that, as such, worker stats in the API (yeah, the same thing I just fixed earlier today, which is why the problem just showed up) are disabled until I get it rewritten.  Possibly tonight, but more likely tomorrow.

I apologize for the inconvenience... I guess the user stats hadn't been working since I made a change a few days ago and when I fixed the api to accommodate the change today the old method of calculating stats puts the new table under too big a strain.

I believe this is also the cause of the intermittent Can't connect to RPC errors some of you noticed as well, so this should eliminate that as well.  Three bugs fixed for the price of one!  Bonus... err wait..

EDIT: whoops wrong thread...

I responded in your thread. My point still stands and is still valid unless there is something new and interesting that you've come up with that no one else has to reduce latency.

@Inaba Hey thanks for taking the time to answer and ask the questions.. It's appreciated.

Hey Inaba, I vaguely recall you thought about providing some kind of incentive for top miners. I'm assuming you've dropped that? Variance is starting to make me think about trying a larger pool.

Inaba's been busy adding new graphs instead of playing games.

Stop with the feature requests, damn it!

Someone get a big stick.

But it's true, I haven't been able to game for the past two or three days!  

I've confirmed a NIC problem on the DB server. I will need to bring the server down to replace it.

I will be moving the server to another rack at the same time and replacing both NICs with some more reliable Intel ones. You should see a very slight increase in response time to the server (translating into slightly less stales).

I will be doing this today instead of next week like planned.  I will probably bring the server down in about an hour, so around 10 AM CST (15:00 UTC).  I hope for downtime to be less than 30 minutes.  But it's better than having intermittent drop outs for no apparent reason all weekend.

+1
What he said

It's not better... eth1 is still dropping packets for some inexplicable reason. 

I'm going to be rebooting the server a couple times to see if I can manage to track down the issue.