Upgrades: Hardware

Written By: - Date published: 4:00 pm, May 9th, 2008 - 13 comments
Categories: admin - Tags: ,

 Upgrade is complete

There will be a hardware upgrade on monday during working hours (still trying to get the time). The site will be offline for up to an hour while the system gets transferred.

The upgrade should eliminate the capacity issues that have been showing every few days. I’ve limited the problem by reducing the number of simultaneous connections. This caused the system to stop swapping memory out while sending pages. However it will have reduced speed periodically during high demand.

This server side issue has been showing up since I started upgrades on the site. While the traffic per IP has reduced as a result of the upgrades, the total traffic has been increasing. This mainly seems to be from the multitudinous web-crawlers picking up every page in the site again.

Lynn

13 comments on “Upgrades: Hardware ”

  1. lprent 1

    I’ve opened up this area for comments.

    Let me know if anyone spots issues that are not from recaptcha, gravatars, or sharethis (they are all external to the site).

    But it seems a lot more snappy. I’ll monitor today looking at the backend before I start widing up the number of connections again.

  2. r0b 2

    Thanks once more for all your hard work on this site Lynn.

  3. Agreed – thanks Lynn, the site is looking really good and I’m loving the gravatar. You rock! (in a grumpy-tech kinda way…)

  4. Billy 4

    lprent, what they said.

  5. lprent 5

    “in a grumpy-tech kinda way ”

    I think that comes with skill sets. I’ve been told off by mechanics for the things I do to my car. Told off by doctors for my smoking habit. Told off by the bank for the way that I pay the mortgage. ……..

    I’ve was having fun yesterday looking at recaptcha post bounces. There are an amazing number of machines with a .ru reverse DNS.

    captcha: but massacre
    definitely what is happening to the spam…

  6. lprent 7

    🙂 Not the best of weird al lyrics. There is no official video for it. But this is his best set of lyrics

    If god smoked cannabis by Weird Al and Joan Osbourne

    I don’t imbibe myself (it is incompatible with coding), but this has to be his most satirical song.

  7. lprent 8

    Interesting. May’s bandwidth usage to date is just hitting March’s total. My various bandwidth savers mean that we’re still likely to exceed Aprils total in May, but at least it isn’t going to double again.

    I hate to think what I did to the gravatar site when I turned that feature on. It didn’t cost this site much, but we were only sending an MD5.

    Anyway, it looks like the site likes its new resources. After a busy couple of days, it went 5MB into swap not the nearly 300MB it was getting after a day. Just been tuning the site again to increase delivery speed.

  8. r0b 9

    It’s all looking sweet out here in user land!

  9. lprent 10

    Test message
    bold
    italic
    strikeout
    underline

    block quote

  10. lprent 11

    Yawn. Just finished cleaning the nasty characters that crept into the database while we were moving around servers at the end of Jan. It was a result of translating from a latin-1 character set to UTF8 and back (or vice versa – can’t remember now). Eventually I stopped trying to do it in a sophisticated way, and just did it with a nice little (and fast) search an replace plugin.

    The site will run a bit slow while I run a search reindex.

    Looks like I killed most of them.

    captcha: New print
    yeah right

  11. lprent 12

    Testing tinyMCE comments

     

  12. lprent 13

    Testing ajax comments

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