Need for Speed: Server Move

[Thorburn]

Thanks to some contributions, we have been able to move Skadi to a significantly faster server, and shall be able to keep it there for at least three months.

Let me know please, how the speed is on your end.

[Marius]

If it is not during a peek moment, the speed has significantly increased. The problem still remain for the peek moments, when you want to post something. I do not have measures in terms of exchanged packets/s or something like that.

[Thorburn]

Thanks for your input.

Actually, there are no peak moments currently. All four CPUs run at the moment 90+% idle on average.

Currently Active Users: 100 (31 members and 69 guests)

  8:15am  up  6:58,  1 user,  load average: 0.31, 0.37, 0.34
99 processes: 96 sleeping, 3 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU0 states: 11.8% user,  3.1% system,  0.0% nice, 85.1% idle
CPU1 states: 16.1% user,  1.3% system,  0.0% nice, 82.6% idle
CPU2 states: 0.4% user,  3.1% system,  0.0% nice, 96.5% idle
CPU3 states: 0.1% user,  1.3% system,  0.0% nice, 98.6% idle

We might reach maybe between 1.5 - 2.0 *NIX max during peak times (Friday, Saturday, during the time of European night/late night and North American evening/night when the combined traffic hits us) what is just nice - not causing any delays.

Posts take longer to process than read requests because
a. they have to be parsed, converted to HTML, written twice (once raw, once in HTML format), indexed for the search engine, post counters have to be updated, attachments have to be thumbnailed, &c.
b. the result of these processes has to be inserted into the database and index files, which is a much more intensive operation than to read tables; while this happens, the database has to be locked for writing, in order that no other write requests conflict, overwrite data and corrupt the database - many people updating the database (i. e. by posting, by PMs, by submitting an Arcade score, by giving reputation points, &c.) will cause delays.
c. vB 3 is a very complex and resource-intensive software, and the longer your post is and the more formatting it has, the longer, in general, it takes to parse it and to perform the above-mentioned operations.
d. A thread to which you reply might not be in the write cache.
e. All requests (reading and writing) use the same harddrive; reads enjoy priority over writes.

There is no way to speed this up other than
1. more memory (the more things can be kept in memory, the faster processes become),
2. SCSI-320 harddrives for more speed,
3. harddrives with a larger physical disk cache,
4. mySQL 4 (makes a big difference on large vB3 boards such as Skadi; three times as fast than mySQL 3; we'll install that eventually, once we don't have to give up our security for it.)

[Marius]

Yes, in fact, this is what I wanted to tell, it all depends very much on the relational database manager. I do not know very well, mySQL, even if I heard it is a very good and free one. Oracle has good products, but I do not know for the latest versions, I changed a bit the working area.

Besides this, you are right with the security issues, since you know better. Anyway, it works better now. Thank you.

[Johannes de León]

well, the speed increased a lot, since today's morning (GMT) if i am not wrong!
and let me add that this server is ablazing fast!

[Stephen]

Thx Njörd, the forum is lot faster now.

[Fenris]

Congrats on the server move, it's hearing about things like having to buy new servers and deal with load-balancing and optimisation that really make me glad that I don't own a heavily active forum, I just admin a couple.


I think you guys are doing a sterling job though, and in celebration of the server move, I shall now post a random, attractive Russian woman.

[Ewergrin]

Congrats on the server move, it's hearing about things like having to buy new servers and deal with load-balancing and optimisation that really make me glad that I don't own a heavily active forum, I just admin a couple.


I think you guys are doing a sterling job though, and in celebration of the server move, I shall now post a random, attractive Russian woman.

Her name and phone number, please.