Dear community,

Since Wednesday 18th we have been experiencing significant slow-down on the DOAJ in all its interfaces.  This is an outline of what we have been doing to combat this, and the more aggressive measures that we are now going to take to resolve the issue.

We have been monitoring the usual diagnostics for the datastore, which look at memory, CPU usage, and network performance.  All of these are registering within normal working parameters throughout the issue.

Nonetheless, on average requests are taking 3 - 5 seconds longer than they should, and with no clear cause.  There have been brief outages too, though for the most part the system has remained "up" in the technical sense. This is an unprecedented event.

# Plan of action

Turn off the whole system, and re-introduce capabilities bit-by-bit until we identify the area(s) that are responsible for the performance issues. 

During this period large areas of the system will be unavailable, and this may result in a degraded experience in particular for end users of the API and OAI-PMH endpoint.

We hope to resolve these issues in the next day or so. We apologise for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.