After the transition to the new hosting facility we’ve noticed a degradation in performance of the SDMB on it’s new server. To correct this we’ll be performing an upgrade on the new server which we hope will at least bring us back to the performance we had when it was hosted at the Chicago Reader. That is approximately 3500 new posts a day during the work week.
While we could wait for about 7 days to have the upgrade performed during non-business hours we decided it better to proceed ahead as quickly as possible. We therefore are going to upgrade the SDMB web server (which also hosts www.straightdope.com) sometime between 12:00 and 16:00 CDT on Thursday, September 16th. We don’t know exactly when it will happen within that 4 hour time span but we ask you to be prepared for the SDMB to not be available during that time.
Thanks,
Jerry Davis
Information Systems Director
Chicago Reader, Inc.
11 E. Illinois St.
Chicago, IL 60611
Let’s be honest. The server performance here blows goats. As in useless. What kind of daily bandwidth thus this server blow? I’d guess you need a dedicated box. Consider banner ads.
I, for one, appreciate the quick attempt at a fix. It would have been all too easy to let us dangle, swaying and twisting in the wind until you got good and ready to deal with the fix. I sincerely appreciate the sense of urgency.
If I’m reading this right, the board was running on its own server, and for some time was living in the break room at the CR offices, under the Dunkin Donuts box.
Then, you pick it up and take it to a proper hosting facility, where it’s now bolted into a server rack.
Unfortunately, like a ficus, it’s not happy that it was moved, and has been behaving poorly.
Poetic license aside, I’ve got the general idea so far?
Why was the server’s performance impaired by being moved? If anything, I’d expect it to be better, assuming the hosting facility has a better pipe to the internet than whatever came to the CR offices.
And, what was the upgrade? More RAM? Another processor? Went to Animal Kingdom and bought the premium Hamster Kibble?
The dedicated server we had for the SDMB at the Chicago Reader is still at the Reader . The dedicated server we had built by our new hosting provider is brand new and unfortunately underperforming. That new server will be upgraded doubling it’s RAM (this is primarily the problem), adding a 2nd processor and a installing a new SMP capable kernel.
Thanks, Jerry! I’d like to say, though, that I hadn’t noticed how bad the performance has been, probably because I remember how lousy it was in 2002. Compared with THAT it’s been FLYING!
I’d been holding off posting a “performance since the hosting switchover sucks like a battalion of leeches and vampire bats after a pretzel fest” post, giving y’all time to tweak and optimize settings, but it has truly been bad.
The upgrade is essentially finished. We may still do something to improve the multiprocessing capability of the backend database but that should be transparent to all. The server clock got screwed around with again so a number of posts will be out of order. The clock is now back to where it should be.
I’m seeing a reduction in load on the server and an increase in outgoing bandwidth usage. These are steps in the right direction. I’ll watch the board’s average new post counts over the next few days and that will give me a better idea of overall performance.
The time is fixed, but now search isn’t working. I had just finished a successful search and tried another one. I got the message “Sorry! The administrator has specified that you can only do one search every 30 seconds”. I waited more than 30 seconds by the clock, tried again, and got the same message.
I’ve thought about this a bit. I’ll speculate that my last successful search was just before the time was corrected, and the software thinks my new search is not 30 seconds after my last search. So this’ll probably correct itself when real time catches up in a few hours, and I can live with that.
I love the little clock oddity we had this afternoon. In this thread and this thread some of this afternoon’s posts got anomolously dated ~7pm this evening. Now when people post replies, they’re getting sorted into the thread to a position before the mis-stamped entries.
The ‘last poster’ entry is updating properly, but doesn’t point to the actual last post. This’ll probably sort itself all out (with or without permanent errors) by 8pm this evening.
