Board Logo

Server Maintenance This Coming Weekend (Completed)
vanderaj - May 8th, 2008 at 12:54 PM

Hi there,

Our hoster is moving their data center from Dallas to somewhere else. As part of that move, they are giving us more RAM, more and faster CPUs, and so on.

I'm also taking the opportunity to update the underlying operating system of the forum to a nice stable 64 bit platform.

Therefore, during the wee hours (i.e. AEST early Sunday AM) this coming weekend, there will be a bit of disruption whilst I move things from this server to the new server. As I actually get the new server online (it's not been provisioned as yet), I will announce the exact hours we will be down.

thanks,
Andrew

vanderaj - May 9th, 2008 at 12:08 PM

Okay, I have the new host provisioned, and have been hardening it. I will port my blog and a few other test sites to it tomorrow and see how it holds up. If it's good, we will be moving to the new server.

Downtime starts: Sunday 2 AM AEST
Downtime ends: Sunday 6 AM AEST

What will change

There should be a noticeable speed increase. No outwardly visible software changes.

  • The new server has 8 x 2.5 GHz processors (up from 4 x 2.0 GHz), and even better, we're getting another 128 MB of RAM! Yay!
  • The OS is changing from Fedora Core 6 to CentOS 5, both 64 bit
  • PHP, MySQL, and Apache will all be upgraded to the latest versions
  • XCache is integrated into PHP, so we will have opcode caching back again.

    I'll post benchmarks of the two servers once I have a backup installed on the new server.

    thanks,
    Andrew

    vanderaj - May 11th, 2008 at 08:07 AM

    Okay, for this domain, the move is finished. All went well so far, and the performance is even better than I hoped.

    Using

    ab -c 20 -n 1000 http://forums.aussieveedubbers.com/index.php 

    The old server maxed out at 69 requests a second, averaging 67 over three tries.
    The new server reliably posts 180 (!) requests a second, averaging 180 (!) requests per second (!)

    This is 2.6x as fast. Awesome.

    In addition, the Gallery (see the link in the header?) will be back online later this morning. I have to upgrade the software and check that there's not too much spam.

    Andrew

    MickH - May 11th, 2008 at 09:34 AM

    Well done Andrew:tu: If it wasn't for you we would still be rubbing sticks together to make fire!!!:lol:

    vanderaj - May 11th, 2008 at 01:27 PM

    Okay, the Gallery is back online and working just fine.

    I had to kill the comments - spam a lot.

    thanks,
    Andrew