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Server Upgrades Complete, MacRumors Now Snappier

Yay! Thanks for the upgrade. This is my favorite website...I spend way too much time over here (is that a good or bad thing? hmmm...)
 
kellen said:
who would vote this one negative? 3 so far at time of this posting.
Click to expand...

I suggest that Arn finds out who wants a slower MR and makes their wish come true. That would surprise them.

No-votes don't mean anything- it's all for fun.
 
Great news! Glad to hear of the growth of such a great community.
 
I don't know if this is real or not...

Where are the elevator shots?:D:apple:

Great job, I come to this website on a daily basis.
 
Scaling

Any thoughts you could put together about scaling the site to five servers? Do you have one dedicated database server for your vbulletin install and four apache servers? Are you running four servers that mirror each other and are then load balanced? If that's true how are you replicating your database across the servers?

Just curious about how one might scale a bulletin board app :) that's all. Great work. I've lurked for most of my history on this site (including before I registered).
 
aftk2 said:
Any thoughts you could put together about scaling the site to five servers? Do you have one dedicated database server for your vbulletin install and four apache servers? Are you running four servers that mirror each other and are then load balanced? If that's true how are you replicating your database across the servers?

Just curious about how one might scale a bulletin board app :) that's all. Great work. I've lurked for most of my history on this site (including before I registered).
Click to expand...

Good question.

The site growth progression was as follows:

1. Single Dedicated Server (had it for other reasons). Site (mostly static) + Forums (PHP) + MySQL DB. (year: 2000, so the server was modest by today's standards)

2. As the forums grew, it took additional resources, causing high loads. I eventually added a dedicated Forum server with additional RAM. That brought us to 2 servers. Main site + Forum/DB server.

3. Forum/DB server again started getting busy. At this point, MySQL was the main culprit. Added a dedicated MySQL server, with more RAM, and RAID 5 SCSI for additional drive performance. So 3 servers. Main Site + Forum + MySQL

4. Things stayed there for a while I believe. Added a 4th Misc server for additional projects, guides, ad server, to not overload the existing servers.

5. Forum server loads started getting high, so added the existing 4th server into the mix as a round-robin PHP server. So forums were split over 2 PHP servers (unevenly) and the mysql server.

6. In the past few months, forum servers were getting busy at times, especially with high traffic events in the past few months. I decided to upgrade all servers, as a number of servers were showing their age (a few years old), and split the forum servers into two equal dedicated servers. Just replacing the existing servers with modern servers actually gave us more room to grow as the existing servers were a few years old.

7. So now we're at Main Site, 2 Forum servers, 1 DB server (RAID 10 SCSI), and 1 Misc server (guides, ads, attachments).

Along the lines, various optimizations have been incorporated. Memcached, PHP accelerators, alternative search engine, cached forum pages.

All the rules change for keynote/MacRumorsLive days, for which we have to bring on some additional horsepower to handle the traffic. The forums, though, may be ok in the future - but won't know for sure until we hit that ceiling.

arn
 
Look, Xserve boxes have their place. They are a solid option for small to medium sized companies that perhaps have a couple racks of "manually" maintained servers mainly to fulfill the IT needs of internal employees.

However, for bulk, commodity-type hosting, there is no reason at all to pay a premium on hardware or an OS. Why? These boxes are buried in a massive data center somewhere and nobody ever administers them directly. You have a common Linux image, perhaps RHE, that gets blown down to the most recent lot of 500 servers that you ordered. These things are like grains of sand on the beach. They're little worker bees that handle hundreds of thousands of requests a day. They're often completely headless and run at runtime level 3 (no X-server.) These data centers have a qualified staff to handle everything that might happen. The savings of Linux over a proprietary OS and hardware get passed along to the customer. Everyone is happy.

This scenario is a far cry from the 100 person company that has 2 guys doing IT. These guys might be MCSEs if you're lucky, but they probably don't know much about Linux. They're managing everything by hand. These 2 guys desperately need to throw out and Linux and Windows boxes they have and replace them with Xserve boxes. This isn't Macrumors.com though, because Arn already indicated they've done the smart thing and outsourced the hosting.
 
It is always good to see this site grow. The past few months have seen the biggest jump that I can remember. A lot faster and more reliable then the old days.:)
 
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