Why does the site always "die" at midnight EST?

[src]

Over the past couple of months, one thing I have noticed is that EVERY time I am browsing at midnight EST, the site becomes unresponsive for 5-10 minutes. EVERY time. I have to keep refreshing - no errors, just no response from the server. Even odder, there's not even a timeout message most of the time, so the browser is seeing _some_ communication.

Just curious. Thanks.

 

[reefrunner69]

I believe there is some daily scheduled server maintenance that occurs at midnight EST, so for the few minutes it takes for that task to be accomplished the server load is very high.

 

[fishfreek]

Copying and gziping 2+ gigs of data files and 1.5gigs of database takes a little time.