Just had to restart our main MySQL instance today. Had to do it at 6am since that’s the lowest traffic point, and boy howdy this resonates.

2 solid minutes of the stack throwing 500 errors until the db was back up.

If you have the bandwidth… it is absolutely worth it to invest in a maintenance mode for your system, just check some flat file on disk for a flag before loading up a router or anything and then, if it’s engaged, just send back a static html file with ye olde “under construction” picture.