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Software Engineering vocabulary · Debugging and Troubleshooting

Downtime

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

/ˈdaʊntaɪm/nounCore term

In software engineering, downtime means: The amount of time a system or service is not available to users, either because of a failure or because of planned maintenance.

In Turkish: kesinti süresi, erişilemezlik süresi, hizmet dışı kalma süresi

How it is used

Uncountable: 'two hours of downtime', 'minimize downtime'. 'Planned downtime' is announced maintenance; 'zero-downtime deployment' means releasing without interrupting users. The opposite is uptime.

Example sentences

  1. The database upgrade needs about fifteen minutes of downtime, so we'll do it at night.

  2. Every hour of downtime costs the shop thousands of euros in lost orders.

Common collocations

  • planned downtime
  • minimize downtime
  • zero-downtime deployment
  • unexpected downtime
  • uptimeThe time or percentage of time that a system is working and available, often written as a figure such as 99.9 percent over a month or a year.
  • outageA period when a service, system or part of it is not working or cannot be reached by users.
  • SLAShort for service level agreement: a contract that promises customers a certain level of service, such as 99.9 percent uptime, and says what happens if it is not met.
  • high availabilityDesigning a database system so that it keeps working with very little downtime, even if a server, disk or data center fails.
  • blue-green deploymentA release method with two identical production environments: the new version is put on the idle one, then all traffic is switched to it at once.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Debugging and Troubleshooting

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