We apologize for the difficulties some of you may have had accessing our board and site recently.
About ten hours prior to this post, we were in maintenance mode for about 45 minutes in order to move our database to our new server. (The downtime just a few hours ago was not due to our upgrade, but an issue with the host.)
We are now up and running on our new two-server cluster
Server specs:
New Database server:
Dual Opteron 246 64 Bit Processors
2 Gigabyte PC3200 ECC DDR RAM
SATA RAID 5 w/3 drives
64 Bit Linux Operating Sytem
Web Server:
3.06 Pentium 4
1 Gigabyte of RAM
Linux Operating System
The new server environment should provide a noticeable improvement in both speed and the availability of our search.
Thank you all for your patience and understanding :D
Amy
Sweet!
The Opterons are just great for db... you'll love it :D
Wow thats great
Ahhhh.... Success = increased demands. :D
Thanks for the added server and the help it will be.
Sweet! A very noticeable difference. Kewlness! ;D ;)
Thats so cool. New servers and all, right on.
Good move 8)
Coo!
good stuff
Looks like a cool setup, me likes AMD processors :)
Sweet! Major w00tage! ;D
Yahoo!
edit. This really seems faster!
Good job. :)
Awesome. Running nice and fast. :)
Faster by far, nice upgrade! :)
Absolutely great! :D
Cool setup, But wouldn't it be just sufficient to run it on that "Dual Opteron" server alone? I mean it's just that there's no need to pay for 2 servers, when you can pay for one.
Mini
Derek, have you seen all the comments about your hard work?
Quote from: MH-MINI on July 20, 2006, 09:11:10 PM
Cool setup, But wouldn't it be just sufficient to run it on that "Dual Opteron" server alone? I mean it's just that there's no need to pay for 2 servers, when you can pay for one.
Mini
From looking at the loads, I think it would be pushing it, especially when you consider mail, cvs, and all the other stuff we have running. Plus, we're going for scalabilty (add more web server later if need be)
Quote from: Amacythe on July 21, 2006, 12:18:42 AM
Derek, have you seen all the comments about your hard work?
:D
Is the DB server on the same private switch as the webserver (the server that runs apache)?
Mini
This is good news. :)
Thanks Guys,
Mini - Considering that both servers are stored in the DC where one of the SMF moderators is a Tech - I am sure they are ;)
And from what I have seen of dschwab9, both here and on other forums, he certainly knows what he is doing - so please dont worry about how he implements/manages the server :)
Quote from: MH-MINI on July 21, 2006, 04:39:56 AMIs the DB server on the same private switch as the webserver (the server that runs apache)?
No it's not. We don't mix dual processor machines with single processor machines (Different power requirements). The servers actually aren't that close to each other in the DC, though i believe they're both running on the same Agg router, which helps speeds.
And going off the page creation time, it really makes no difference.
Quote from: Tony on July 21, 2006, 05:16:05 AM
Mini - Considering that both servers are stored in the DC where one of the SMF moderators is a Tech - I am sure they are ;)
I actually think that Dogulas is a Sales rep of DN; not a techie - it's a big difference.
Quote
And from what I have seen of dschwab9, both here and on other forums, he certainly knows what he is doing - so please dont worry about how he implements/manages the server :)
I am not worrying about anything, and I do know that he knows what he is doing. It is called "curiousity". Please don't say things that you have absolutely no idea about, because I am not doubting Derek in any way. It is pure curiosity, period. I think you are just making assumptions that are not true.
Mini
It really makes no difference where the servers are located as long as there's a good, low latency connection between them. Only way it would become an issue is if one of the ports or switches was being maxed out with other traffic, like in a DOS attack. In that case, it would also affect a private switch.
Edit: Just did a traceroute and there's 2 hops between the servers. Latency is less that 2ms. We currently have about 900 people online and database traffic is averaging about 71 queries per second.
Thanks for taking the time to upgrade :D
What is the name of the host? Or is this a secret to avoid others to buy an webserver there aswell.
Even though, the difference is notiseable :D
Birger :)
QuoteWhat is the name of the host? Or is this a secret to avoid others to buy an webserver there aswell.
DedicatedNow as posted above ;)
I can honestly not track the above answear?
Birger :)
It's not in this thread, but I think it was mentioned somewhere else. Yes, Dedicated Now is the host. I'm a bit disapointed with the recent outages, but for the most part, they are great. Performance has been great with the exception of the recent network issues.
I think you will notice a major difference with those Opterons!
Maddocks
Quote from: Nordoelum on August 01, 2006, 02:16:35 AMI can honestly not track the above answear?
Rumor has it that they have a slackin' sales rep here somewhere. Now where'd that idjit go?!? :D
Must say that it is pretty amazing that the servers for this portal are in USA DC, and a lot of users from all over the world browsing this site every day.
As soon as i click on any button, or any download it reacts directly (98% of the times) and it change the pages, send my download in a split second. Im in Sweden, about 12 flighthours away from DC, and still it works in a split second.
Have you ever thought of it like that ? The servers working to collect information from 800+ users from all over the world t the same time. Tome is't a wonder it works at all :)
Thank you SMF Team for holding all this to gether for us
This is just an alternative for redundancy purposes, but have you considered EV1Servers (http://www.ev1servers.net)?
Their network as far as connectivity is unparalleled, and the 5+ years I've had a dedicated server with them, they had one outage that lasted about 15 minutes, and this was due to configuration error (oops) on one of their routers.
2Gb Ram seems to be really low for me. Why not upgrade it to 4GB to speedup the system?
4GB RAM costs money.
Mini
We're not even utilizing the full 2GB most of them time - the databases simply aren't that big. It currenly wouldn't improve performance to go over 2GB. When the need arises, we will upgrade.
how big is the current SMF database?
Does it fit into the 2GB?
Quote from: klumy on October 04, 2006, 11:12:37 AM
Does it fit into the 2GB?
The 2GB is that the server has is RAM, not hard-drive space. I'd imagine that the database is less than 1GB.
Mini
The database is 2.9 gigs
Didn't know that the DB would grow that fast, I think [Unknown] announced last year or so that it was about 270MB or something.
Mini
Quote from: dschwab9 on October 04, 2006, 10:35:34 PM
The database is 2.9 gigs
in this case it would make sense to increase the ramsiye so the whole database could be loaded into the ram, which would improve speed
But in reality, the whole database doesn't need to fit in RAM in our case. For example, lots of the database records are really really old (from the forum, years back, for example), and aren't necessarily queried very often.
Trust me, the database server is doing just fine ;D At the moment, it's only using 1.8GB of RAM and all of MySQL's caches are at healthy untilization levels, which means any additional RAM would just be sitting around unused (and costing money). I'm all about having beefy servers, but you reach a point where any extra is just over kill. If/when we start swapping a lot, we'll add another gig of RAM. It's just not necessary at the moment.
Nice new DB server Derek, but I would knock out that old Pentium4 and let the Opties do it all.
That would speed up even more :)
And you are right, more ram costs a lot when it's doing nothing ;)
That is good as i couldnt get on here a few times but now it should be up all the time :D
The system goes down a lot, in the last couple of weeks it was donw more then 4 times for a long time.
Using more servers just complicates the matter to keep it running.
Quote from: Bas on December 15, 2006, 02:36:25 PM
Using more servers just complicates the matter to keep it running.
Of course, it all depends on what is causing the problems. Sometimes you need to add a server to solve a problem. Separating the database from the website server is beneficial on a site like this as you can then tune each server for the type of load on it. While you do have the problem of interconnectivity with that type of arrangement, you might have made your problems simpler.
I disagree a whole lot.
The server on this site is made too complicated over nothing.
I wonder how much traffic it does, but did you ever calculated how much traffic a simple 100Mbit card can do a month?
It will scare the living daylight out of anybody.
More servers doesn't need to give more speed, it might, but for sure more servers gives more overhead....and the overhead should be talken very light, as it will be a lot.
Sorry I disagree with you a lot, there is no point to seperate 1 webserver from 1 database server, unless you have 10 webservers using the same database, only then you have a solid point.
It isn't so much speed as load. 100 mbit is very fast, and if you are serving static content you don't need anything fancy (although system RAM is helpfl for caching at that point).
If, however, you are moving onto dynamic sites, you might run into an issue where one side or another is fighting for resources. At that point, if you've already done all you can to help that situation, it might make more sense to build out instead of up (add another machine rather than getting a bigger machine). Once you do that, you can then work on making each part work as best it can on the server it is sitting on.
Yeah all nice, but the servers here (SMF server) crash a couple of times a week.
So it didn't improve that much.
I wish they would move all to the Opterons, then the crashing should be a thing from the past ;)
Moving to an Opteron isn't the proper solution if there is no need to. In at least one of the cases, there was some problem with the mail queue.
Guys, I think we've had enough discussion on this. Bottom line is, we have two servers, one database and one web server. It might grow in the future, however, there is no chance of it going back to one server. What we are doing works, and works well. Yes, there have been some glitches, but that's part of growing, AND, the majority of them end up being connectivity issues beyond our control.