Varnish/503 errors

[denise]

Well, the good news is that Dreamwidth is hopping this week! The bad news is that our recent changes to make the site auto-scale during periods of high server and database load have apparently been too conservative, and that's leading to the Varnish/503 errors that people are getting. (The mysterious ones that say "backend fetch failed, guru meditation error" -- the error message is highly unhelpful, but in our defense y'all aren't supposed to see it!)

We are continuing to tweak things to improve performance, and we apologize for the errors. We'll have them fixed as soon as we can.