Written By:
lprent - Date published:
7:47 pm, February 10th, 2015 - 31 comments
Categories: admin, humour, Satire, The Standard -
Tags: pot, vanity posts
Well 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) ….
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)…
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*….
* Except without the side effects
😈
The current rise of populism challenges the way we think about people’s relationship to the economy.We seem to be entering an era of populism, in which leadership in a democracy is based on preferences of the population which do not seem entirely rational nor serving their longer interests. ...
The server will be getting hardware changes this evening starting at 10pm NZDT.
The site will be off line for some hours.
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.
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.
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….
2.98GB of which is Pete George’s cries from the soapbox.
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’..
Lost you from No2 onwards, pays to be a luddite methinks, all the best with that.
Blame the beige badger, I say.
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.
Which would be why nobody follows you. You really are the most negative person on this site.
Yeah it was a close call between PG and Brett Dale, But Dale came second due to the hoverboard…
now, now. not moaning.
baiting or berating the beige badger, perhaps. between yawns.
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.
Just for you Iprent.
Thanks for all the work you do, it’s marvellous and very much appreciated.
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.
+1
lprent rulz…
+ 1
Well done Lprent your tolerance to our ramblings is much appreciated 🙂
+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…
Good luck with the upgrade, Lynn. I’ll see you on the other side.
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!)
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.
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.
I reckon it’s faster now. By my estimate, old page loads took over 2 seconds, now it’s less than 1 second.
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.
Thanks for keeping it all running.
Thanks Lprent. We’ll do our best to break this one too 😈
Yes I can see that – damn you all to a purgatory of blogging and detached robust discussions…
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.
Fascinating. Perhaps you could do a study going back to when John ‘Higher Standards’ Key was first elected and see if there are similar spikes when he dumped the likes of Richard Worth, Pansy Wong, Judith Collins etc. It would be ironic indeed if the popularity of TS was directly tied to the incompetence of the average Nat MP.
ps. the current Tory line on Sabin is nothing to see here, move along. You may have unintentionally broken ranks by suggesting that some people might still be just a wee bit interested in the matter.
Micky Savage that scoundrel!
Millie Small? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYj9J4UH8ck
Mark (E) Smith? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InXwZc4RS7M
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 😛