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Administrivia: Time for a new server
vanderaj - May 17th, 2013 at 01:36 PM

The new server has been up for a little while, and now it's time to move across. I'm going to be moving my other domains this afternoon, and AVDS will occur late tonight. There might be a few backups in meantime. I apologise in advance for the odd availability today, but it has to be done sooner or later.

thanks
Andrew


vanderaj - May 17th, 2013 at 06:23 PM

Okay, the new server is ready to rock - n - roll. I've transitioned my personal and work domains to the new server. All that remains is Aussieveedubbers. I've re-enabled PHP caching and Mod PageSpeed, so you should see things being a bit more snappy once on the new server.

I just need to take a final backup, copy it across, and change the DNS. As such, tonight's outage will start at 11 pm tonight and will last to around 1 AM. But ... you won't see it immediately unless you haven't been to AVDS in the last 600 minutes.

You'll know you're on the new server after tomorrow morning if you can post. The old server will not be in a posting mood. Delays after tomorrow are more about your ISP's DNS infrastructure and your computer's DNS. You can force your computer to do a DNS refresh by rebooting your computer (or using a DNS refresh if you know to do that from the command line on your OS - see http://www.wikihow.com/Refresh-DNS  for more details).

thanks,
Andrew


vanderaj - May 17th, 2013 at 09:44 PM

About 2.25 hours to migration.


vanderaj - May 17th, 2013 at 10:51 PM

Ten minutes to go. Sorry I can't subtract - it's still 11 pm


vanderaj - May 18th, 2013 at 02:11 AM

And we're back. I've got a little tidying up to do, but pretty much the old workhorse type3 (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS) is now migrated to ghia (Ubuntu 12.04.02 LTS). We still have 16 CPUs but they are about 100% faster than the old ones, a little less disk space, but more RAM. I've re-enabled APC and PageSpeed so things should feel snappy.

Go nuts! Let me know if things don't work for you. I'm particularly interested in how mail works (or doesn't work) for you (subscriptions, favorites, e-mail resets, etc).

thanks
Andrew


Joel - May 19th, 2013 at 09:54 AM

Hi Andrew, only thing I've noticed is it now doesnt automatically refresh when I go from thread back to a forum like it used to.

Doing that both on my phone and my laptop, no biggy for me most other forums don't do it either but AVD did till the swap, for me anyway.


vanderaj - May 19th, 2013 at 11:10 AM

Hi Joel,

I haven't changed the code just the underlying OS, database, and application server. So in theory, things should stay the same. When you say it doesn't refresh, do you mean it doesn't show your post in the thread list? If so, that's a caching issue I can look into. If it's just that it doesn't automatically jump back to the forum, I'm not sure that's a feature.

thanks,
Andrew


beetleboyjeff - May 19th, 2013 at 11:36 AM

Andrew, my laptop is doing as Joel described, but my desktop computer is refreshing just fine. As I usually have AVD open on both computers at the same time & leapfrog posts one to the other - reading a post on one computer while the next opens on the other computer - I is quite noticeable.

It is not a problem, but I did find it curious.


Joel - May 19th, 2013 at 12:00 PM

If I'm on topic activity and go into someones thread and spend say 5 mins reading it when I go back to topic activity I have to manually refresh it now to get any new activity to come up.
It's only started doing it for me since the server change but as Jeff said its no big deal most other forums are like that.

I'm using Firefox if that makes any difference?
IE is the tool of the devil and only good for downloading other browsers.


beetleboyjeff - May 19th, 2013 at 12:29 PM

I am using IE on both computers, and as I said, one refreshes & one doesn't.


vanderaj - May 20th, 2013 at 10:36 PM

Had to disable mod_pagespeed due to it looking up images via a faulty assumption that this is the only site on this computer. It will be back later once I work out the magic invocation.

thanks
Andrew


vanderaj - May 20th, 2013 at 10:42 PM

I've also re-upped the limits from 10 simultaneous users to 25 threads each with 64 listeners, which should be ample for us. I'll keep on monitoring.

thanks
Andrew


vanderaj - May 20th, 2013 at 10:50 PM

Yep, that did the trick. I'm now up from 14 req/s and 985 kB/s on the quiet old server to 35.37 req/s and 2259 kB/s on the busy new server using Apache Bench.

That'll do.


HappyDaze - May 21st, 2013 at 06:32 AM

I don't understand ANY of what you are doing, Andrew.......but thank you for doing it.:tu:


Joel - May 21st, 2013 at 07:29 AM

Yes computer gobbledygook to me too but mine is now refresheing like it used to.
Many thanks Andrew.


MANTA - May 27th, 2013 at 12:29 PM

Heads up ...
Tried Search today ...
Did not return any matches ?