Planned System Downtime
I have some thoughts on planned downtime. Ultimately it boils down to this: is the planned downtime caused by urgent, impending, and guaranteed doom? If yes, then by all means have the downtime whenever you can. If not, affected as few customers as possible, by the numbers. Planned system downtime should minimize impact to system usage - period. By "System Usage" I mean real customers using the system. I recently had a discussion with the systems group about a necessary outage on a system I support. Something important, but not urgent had the possibility to cause downtime on the system. However, if something went wrong and we had to restart a server, the server might not come up. This was deemed as needing pretty serious attention (which I agreed with). They found a fix and wanted to put it into production, as an emergency, planned downtime. We had a downtime window coming up, but this should probably happen before the window. They suggested an evening. Google Anal