Hello sh.itjust.works community,

It’s been a while since my last update, and I owe you all a more detailed one soon. However, today I’m here to give you a heads-up about the upcoming upgrade.

Over the next 7 days, I’ll be upgrading the instance to v19.5. While this update doesn’t strictly require it, I’ve decided to take this opportunity to upgrade our Postgres database from version 15 to 16 as well. This process can be time-consuming and have take up to 2 hours to complete on other instance.

I’m optimistic that we’ll complete it in less time, but to err on the side of caution, I’ve scheduled the maintenance window for 120 minutes.

To minimize downtime, I’ve split the upgrade into two phases: Phase one will cover the database update, and Phase two will handle the Lemmy code upgrade.

Note: If the database upgrade is completed in under 60 minutes, I’ll proceed with the Lemmy code upgrade during the same maintenance window.

Here’s the tentative timeline:

Task	Date	Expected Downtime
Upgrade of Postgres Database	Friday September 20 2024 @ 8:00PM ET	60-120 Minutes
Upgrade to V19.5	Monday or Tuesday September 23 or 24 @ 8:00PM ET	Up to 30 Minutes

During these two planned events those who want to provide moral support or who want to get periodic updates are more than welcome to join us on our matrix channel

edit: 9:23EDT - Hey all, the database and lemmy codebase has been upgraded to v19.5. The database upgrade took a lot less time than expected so I went right into upgrading the codebase. A whole bunch of background tasks are still running which might make your experience slower than usual. Things should be back to normal in the next couple of hours.