LiveJournal has a planned maintenance window starting ... actually right now. It is three hours long. [Edit: in comments somewhere, some employee mentioned that the choice of time is actually the low point of the week in their server logs, so fewest people are inconvenienced.]

From the lj_maintenance entry by dnewhall:

13 January 2010 @ 04:31 pm
Site maintenance scheduled for January 23 @ 3 AM UTC
Hello LJers,

I wanted to keep everyone in the loop on what's been happening in ops-land lately. Over the past week we upgraded the storage system on our global database slave servers. These upgrades provide a number of enhancements, the most important of which is a faster LJ. We were tasked with increasing the throughput of the databases while keeping costs reasonable, and providing a flexible upgrade path. We installed FusionIO ioDrive modules in three of our slave servers and upgraded the version of MySQL they are running. This has translated to much quicker load times, reduced I/O wait (that nasty thing that happens when your hard drives are too slow), and a lot of headroom to add more load. The six ioDrive modules replaced over 100 15k SAS drives, and we are very pleased with their performance overall.

On January 20 we will be upgrading our Perlbal servers. This upgrade provides a critical fix that affects Mogile and scrapbook images. This should help with certain instances where scrapbook photos have become missing. This upgrade is minor, and should be seamless.

We have scheduled a maintenance window for January 23, 2010 at 3 AM GMT/UTC. The window will last for three hours maximum, and LiveJournal.com will not be available. During this time, we will upgrade our Global Master database with FusionIO ioDrives and a newer version of MySQL.

On January 29 we will continue the Mogile upgrades mhwest started in December. We will upgrade the database structure and the software to the most current versions. We anticipate some slowness loading scrapbook images during this time, but the site should continue to run smoothly. These upgrades will provide a more stable service as well as some minor performance increases.

Thanks for reading!
-david

David, who wrote that, is staff. I am a volunteer, and this announcement is that of a general public service for anyone who had forgotten or not heard rather than an official act. Please direct all inquiries to actual LJ staff over there once it's back up.