FAQ Question #167

A cluster is a group of computers designed to work together as one computer. Every LiveJournal account resides on one of LiveJournal's multiple clusters.

Clusters allow LiveJournal to improve site performance by handling a high volume of different requests simultaneously. Additionally, clusters allow maintenance tasks to be divided up, affecting only the users of the cluster being worked on, rather than affecting all users at once.

You can find out which cluster your account is on by logging in (http://www.livejournal.com/login.bml) and visiting http://www.livejournal.com/misc/whereami.bml.

Each cluster occasionally experiences scheduled or emergency maintenance which may make your journal slow to load or temporarily inaccessible. While the LiveJournal administrators will occasionally move groups of accounts to different clusters, it is not possible to request that your account be moved to a different cluster.

You may wish to visit http://status.livejournal.org/ to find out about current maintenance activities that may be affecting your cluster. You can also add the journal "lj_maintenance" to your friends list (http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=lj_maintenance) to receive announcements of LiveJournal maintenance activities.