Background
We are currently hosted on a virtual private server. This gives us ultimate control, but it's like our previous shared hosting in that we shared one physical box with a number of other sites. However, on this particular VPS, disk was a shared SAN. Forums need a lot of disk bandwidth - we read a lot of data all the time. Any time that reads are blocked for any reason, you get a slow down. I think it's no secret that the forum has been fairly slow at times during peak Australian hours. I think this is because that's when the USA takes backups, and the SAN was real busy doing backups.
So we are going to move to a new server shortly - most likely in the next few days. I have to buy a dedicated server at a new hoster and configure the new server, which will take a few days. Once it's configured, I will be making a test migration to see how well the new hardware copes with the server. We currently max the site out at 175 requests per second under ideal circumstances:
Document Path: /viewtopic.php?tid=67978
Document Length: 20636 bytes
Concurrency Level: 3
Time taken for tests: 0.682905 seconds
Complete requests: 100
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 2145800 bytes
HTML transferred: 2063600 bytes
Requests per second: 146.43 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 20.487 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 6.829 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 3067.78 [Kbytes/sec] received
ncurrency Level: 5
Time taken for tests: 184.300136 seconds
Complete requests: 1000
Failed requests: 966
(Connect: 0, Length: 966, Exceptions: 0)
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 60343877 bytes
HTML transferred: 59521877 bytes
Requests per second: 5.43 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 921.501 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 184.300 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 319.74 [Kbytes/sec] received
Once performance is sorted, I'll be migrating the site. The major part is the backup, copy, and restore operation, which is actually quite simple, but it does take time. .
Downtime Notice
As long as the new server acquisition and provisioning goes well, AVDS will be down between 12 midnight Sunday 23rd March to 6 am Sunday AEST. This is Easter Weekend, so get some chocolate to handle the withdrawal symptoms of no AVDS for a few hours.
When you wake up on Easter Sunday, got over the hangover and found your eggs, the new server should be up and running.
thanks,
Andrew
