Damn you readers :) Upgrades again

Written By: - Date published: 7:47 pm, February 10th, 2015 - 31 comments
Categories: admin, humour, Satire, The Standard - Tags: ,

Dolphin Over World 2010Well ok, after the election I figured that I could shift the site to some slower storage with a whole lot of redundancy in a RAID6 array of slower drives. We’d have a lot fewer readers than our peak for about six months after post election, right?

Nope – wrong. I will be pulling the site offline for a few hours tonight at about midnight to put the whole site back on mirrored RAID1 faster solid state drives.

Too many of you have been moaning that the site has been running slowly.

Well you are probably aware of what I am like by now. I like numbers and realistic triggers as prompts for action. When I shifted the site to this configuration, I set a trigger.

It said that when we passed 400 thousand page views for a 30 day period I’d look at efficiency improvements. The bottleneck at present is disk access, mainly when the backups run every hour and the search engine updates every 13 minutes. But that spreads out into the post edits and all those comments you leave. Not to mention people simply reading the site. I shove gigabytes of RAM as file and page and object memcaches, as well as great caches on the database, but the system still spends a lot of time hitting those disks.

So when I just looked at this (it wasn’t that way yesterday damnit) ….

Last 30 days

Double damnit. More than 400k page views for 30 days and still climbing. That means late night work

Just ignore the Unique Visits, it is a rather meaningless figure because it appears to depend more on the tool used to measure it than anything real. Google Analytics thinks with the same parameters that it is about 120k. Sitemeter usually thinks it is higher. Whereas all of the tracking tools agree within a few thousand what the page views are after they discard all of the bots. It is a much more useful measure.

So why was that value of 400k page views the significiant trigger? Well if you look at the monthly figures for last year (I put the values in this one to make it clearer)…

lastyear

 

We only went over 400k page views in May only just before the election. 

Damn you readers. I bloody well know it is you because we don’t use the steroid site enhancers of some other sites. I can see you buggers causing me late night work……

 

…. I’m going to keep an eyeball on you just like philu*….

eye-target

 

* Except without the side effects

side effects

😈

31 comments on “Damn you readers :) Upgrades again ”

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  1. lprent 1
    10 February 2015 at 7:50 pm

    And triple damnit I left out the real message. I will probably start about 2330 and finish at 0130. If it doesn’t work first shot as it should, then I will chop and leave it back at my starting point. I have another busy busy day at the paid work in the morning.

  2. Macro 2
    10 February 2015 at 7:59 pm

    Hehehe.

    I shan’t be causing any pv’s tomorrow – off over to Perth for a few months. But will be looking in when I can. 🙂

    Hope the upgrade goes smoothly for you.

    • lprent 2.1
      10 February 2015 at 8:11 pm

      It should do. It is pretty minor.

      1. Shut down the site.
      2. Install two 120GB SSDs from different suppliers.
      3. Clear their partitions.
      4. Mirror them with mdamd.
      5 Mount and partition the ‘single’ drive.
      6. Copy the 5.4GB of the site on to the drive (3GB files, 2.2GB database).
      7. Bind mount the partition directories in the appropriate spaces using fstab.
      8. Start the site

      Voila!. A hell of a lot easier than what I do during the day….

      • Weepus beard 2.1.1
        10 February 2015 at 9:39 pm

        6. Copy the 5.4GB of the site on to the drive (3GB files, 2.2GB database).

        2.98GB of which is Pete George’s cries from the soapbox.

        • lprent 2.1.1.1
          10 February 2015 at 9:50 pm

          Umm typo there. 5.2GB.

          Nope. I’m sure that he couldn’t outwrite Penny Bright. I have to prune her missives back periodically when they start getting somewhat ‘extensive’..

  3. Marksman33 3
    10 February 2015 at 8:23 pm

    Lost you from No2 onwards, pays to be a luddite methinks, all the best with that.

  4. Sacha 4
    10 February 2015 at 8:30 pm

    Blame the beige badger, I say.

    • Pete George 4.1
      10 February 2015 at 9:31 pm

      Or those moaning about the beige badger.

      The decline of The Daily Blog and the rise and fall of On The Left will likely have impacted here.

      It also helps that there’s a Little hope now on the left. People prefer to follow positives.

      • Draco T Bastard 4.1.1
        10 February 2015 at 10:19 pm

        People prefer to follow positives.

        Which would be why nobody follows you. You really are the most negative person on this site.

        • fender 4.1.1.1
          10 February 2015 at 10:41 pm

          Yeah it was a close call between PG and Brett Dale, But Dale came second due to the hoverboard…

      • Sacha 4.1.2
        11 February 2015 at 10:53 am

        now, now. not moaning.
        baiting or berating the beige badger, perhaps. between yawns.

      • framu 4.1.3
        11 February 2015 at 11:17 am

        The case highlighted a serious environmental problem. Due to the abundance of food preservatives and plastics entering the food chain, people were slowly turning into potentially indestructible ‘living dolls’. Indeed, several exhumations showed that cadavers were not decomposing. Human decay rates were slowing to that of discarded bubble wrap or a Wombles lunch box.

  5. adam 5
    10 February 2015 at 9:23 pm

    Just for you Iprent.

    Thanks for all the work you do, it’s marvellous and very much appreciated.

    • lprent 5.1
      10 February 2015 at 9:53 pm

      I do it for myself. Where else would I have a chance to get be a cranky old man in public?

      Ummm.. Coming to think of it, I’m a programmer. I do it all of the time. Even when I was sort of young.

    • fender 5.2
      10 February 2015 at 10:04 pm

      +1

      lprent rulz…

    • Skinny 5.3
      10 February 2015 at 10:06 pm

      + 1
      Well done Lprent your tolerance to our ramblings is much appreciated 🙂

    • Colonial Rawshark 5.4
      10 February 2015 at 10:29 pm

      +1 Absolutely…

      And no one will mind if you pull the site down a few minutes earlier so that you can get some shuteye a few minutes earlier too…

  6. Ovid 6
    10 February 2015 at 10:23 pm

    Good luck with the upgrade, Lynn. I’ll see you on the other side.

  7. gsays 7
    10 February 2015 at 10:42 pm

    kia ora lprent,
    i want to echo above comments, i am very appreciative of the work you do and that it allows the standard community to exsist.

    i have learnt a lot in the time i have been visiting.

    (i must confess to not really knowing what all that work is that you detailed although i do know what a gig is. rock’n’roll!)

  8. lprent 8
    11 February 2015 at 1:41 am

    Ok all back again. There is an odd dmesg that I will have to look at (may have been there before). But everything seems to be OK.

    Seems faster, but I won’t really know until it goes under load in the morning.

    Longest part of the task was that one of the power cables wasn’t the right one on the supply. Took me a while to find the correct one and plug it into the power supply. I wish they’d standardise those connectors.

    • tc 8.1
      11 February 2015 at 7:34 am

      Top work and aren’t connectors a pain in the proverbial, like our PM there’s the standard and one he came up with the help of others he’s calling a standard.

      Damm annoying when it’s power, you expect it with comms connectors so well done lp.

    • ropata:rorschach 8.2
      11 February 2015 at 9:10 am

      I reckon it’s faster now. By my estimate, old page loads took over 2 seconds, now it’s less than 1 second.

      • lprent 8.2.1
        11 February 2015 at 9:29 am

        That is what I am seeing with the cores. They are spiking a lot faster, presumably because they aren’t doing waits while assembling the non-cached parts of the page.

        It certainly seems faster on my laptop connected via cellphone. But that varies a lot anyway, so it isn’t a good test.

        Inside the cave at work it seems to flick from ‘H’ (low speed) to ‘4G’ according to the external weather.

        What I do notice is that saving comments seems a lot faster.

  9. Murray Rawshark 9
    11 February 2015 at 10:46 am

    Thanks for keeping it all running.

  10. One Anonymous Bloke 10
    11 February 2015 at 10:49 am

    Thanks Lprent. We’ll do our best to break this one too 😈

  11. NZJester 11
    11 February 2015 at 1:19 pm

    I’m wondering if most of this spike of activity on this site is the fault of a certain person whose initials are MS and part of the reason some people are going to have to go back to the polling booths.

  12. Colonial Rawshark 12
    11 February 2015 at 2:01 pm

    ABP Branch video: Bill Binney NSA whistleblower talks about the future of freedom

    The Andersons Bay Peninsula branch of the Labour Party (Dunedin South) is showing a video tonight of Bill Binney, former NSA Technical Director ‘for the world’, and current day whistleblower, followed by a general discussion on the implications for NZ.

    Labour Party building corner of Macandrew St and King Edward St, South Dunedin, 8:15pm tonight.

    All welcome. That includes you too, spooks 😛

The server will be getting hardware changes this evening starting at 10pm NZDT.
The site will be off line for some hours.