ASA announced this few days ago

One thing about the Adsense maintenance has always confused me. I've worked for a couple of mega-banks, some smaller financial institutions and the like and not one of them ever took their systems down (from the customer's perspective) for maintenance. Not a single one of the them.

Maintenance was done, but always offline and then the updated files were applied to the live systems. How come the Adsense system requires that the whole system is taken down for maintenance?

Any ideas?

I think it may be due to the fact that Google has so many servers, so much of everything they do is distributed. To make a change across those servers one at a time or in groups at a time, leaving the other servers live, while users are interacting with them and changing things, would cause some of their servers to get out of sync with each other. The servers would get synced up after coming back online, but there could conceivably be periods where a user changed something, and then logged back in shortly thereafter and didn't see their changes, because that server had been offline and not caught back up yet.

But that's just a guess.

Fredw,

Good point but the servers, even at the best of times, are hopelessly out of synch. Try a search aimed at one server then another and the results are massively different.

nomis,
The system is being updated while all services but one are up, ads are being served aren't they?

There's a detailed AdSense blog post about what goes on during those updates if you are interested.

Nomis: Yes, but differences in web page search results is less important than a customer entering business info on one server and then thinking the new info got lost because it didn't show up on the next server.

It goes back to something you said earlier. A site, like a big bank, would (should) never do this to their public-facing web site, an occasional "out-of-sync" experience is much better than any of the public seeing the service down. However, as Adsense publishers, we're not the public, we're business partners, and it's deemed much more harmful to our impression of them to get an out of sync experience than temporarily no service at all.

You're gonna think I'm making this up. I just now tried to log into Bank of America homebanking, and click on their Bill Pay function, and this is what I see:

Due to scheduled maintenance, Bill Pay and e-Bills is currently unavailable. Bill Pay and e-Bills will become available at 6:00 A.M. Eastern time (3:00 A.M. PT).

So, it does seem banks do it too.

There was a blog post on January 9 of this year about exactly what we're doing during scheduled maintenance.

Basically, we need a time to push big updates, so we schedule some time every month instead of coming to you at random and telling you that stats will be slow for the next few hours while we update things.

ASA

There's a detailed AdSense blog post about what goes on during those updates if you are interested.

Yea, I was amazed to read they actually open up the back of those things and spray in a can of WD-40. And the part where publisher accounts on the server that gets a full can of WD-40 usually experience better earnings than those that get less than a full can was an eye-popping disclosure.

FarmBoy