Slashdot Mirror
Welcome To The New Slashdot Server
After much blood, sweat and tears, the new server appears to be up.
It'll probably be a few hours yet while the DNS trickles over. We'll have a more extensive report describing the new hardware in the next couple of days... but first, we gotta iron out any kinks that pop up.
There's something not quite right about viewing Slashdot on a fast server ... sort of like listening to old Beatles LPs on mp3, or seeing the Blair Witch Project in THX.
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
Umm, you might be checking the _old_ slashdot on Netcraft. I got these results.
64.28.67.48 is running Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) mod_perl/1.22 on Linux
*Joke*
I would like to be the first to claim that Slashdot began to go bad when they went to this new server.
I read somewhere a trick to reduce the load on your Apache:
Set the caducity (word? I mean the time after it is no longer valid) to a date in the future (say after 1 month) for constant images.
Thus, people will cache (locally o proxily) the images and they won't request them from your browser, and images are a lot of bytes per file.
Of course, this is for constant images (formatting pixels, topics,...) not for banner ads, counters and doubleclick bigbrothers.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Right, I am aware of mod_mmap_static, but I think that it's highly overrated at this point. Most significantly, it's at version 0.04 and placed in the "experimental" modules section for a reason: it's not well tested. /. just likes showing off. . . ;)
I think one of the reasons it's not well tested is that this is a pretty incovenient module to use. It makes you list every file to be mmapped, one-by-one, in the Apache config file. That's fine if you need it for, say, the slashbox icons, but it's going to be annoying to edit the server config files every time you want to add or remove a new banner ad.
I also just figured that they wouldn't be using 1 GB of RAM and 10k RPM SCSI drives if they had no performance concerns. Or maybe
--JRZ
- security focus is taking about the Netpliance i-opener
- hollywood bitchslap has a link to the review of keeping the faith
- linux.com tuneup has some old tip bash history
- geek in space is on "Mellow Trancey Version"
btw, extrans (html tags to text) doesnt work (at least in preview mode)Zetetic
Seeking; proceeding by inquiry.
Elench
A specious but fallacious argument; a sophism.
It's an axiom: when a web site is good AND fast, it attracts more and more viewers. There are no good fast web sites; there are only popular, good but slow websites. I expect Slashdot to be fast for about a month, at which point it will be slow as it ever was.
At least a lot more people will be reading, though.
P.S. I'm definitely noticing a nice speed improvement... good work guys! :-)
For the power and security a site like slashdot needs, I am surprised that they haven't switched to Microsoft Windows NT. The boys from Seattle have really done it this time: the all new version for 2000 is hard to beat! Security, stability, scalability, performance-- it's the whole package!
I know it's tempting to go for one of those fly by night 'shareware' operating systems like LinusOS. But, come on now. Slashdot is a big, grown up site. We need NT! Besides, if they get enough business, maybe the Department of Justice won't close down the internet.
Anyway, just another thought from cyberspace-- I'll sign off for now. Gotta get Outlook working again. I've been having trouble ever since I got that joke email-- hope it isn't a virus. If a virus can get past Windows security, can you imagine how many viruses infect LinusOS? I shudder to think.
So will this move make my downloading from warez.slashdot.org faster?
Oh no, looks like the two image servers are running Apache too. Sigh. I love Apache as much as the next guy, but its speed for static files is pretty bleak. /. isn't using such an add-on (since it reports no modules in its HEAD response), we're lead to assume that the server is actually going to the filesystem, loading the image into RAM, and then sending it out over the wire for every single request. Wow. Please, correct me if I'm wrong, becuase I hope slash isn't burning that many cycles. . . /. is using in their new servers that doesn't show up on the radar. Anyone know for sure?
I'd guess that these guys are serving a very limited set of files: the section images (say, 2 kb each * 60 or so images) + whatever handful of ads happen to be rotating at any given time (let's say 10 kb each * 25 active ads) + 100 kb for a few random images I forgot = 470 kb.
Even if that's a wild under-estimate, it's still clear that all the active image content at any given time could fit in a tiny fraction of the server's RAM. Apache, however, doesn't cache static files without an add-on module. So, assuming
You might want to try SGI's QSC (quick shortcut cache), which is an Apache patch (not really a module) designed for SPECweb96, or phhttpd, which is quite similar, but a bit more general-purpose. You could certainly experiment with other web servers too, but I'm assuming it's simpler to administer apache across the board.
Oh well, maybe I'm just missing some neat trick that
--JRZ
how many people out there realize the amount of work that goes into not being able to notice any differences?
how many more do not give any appreciation to the bump in speed?
humph. Stuff looks good so far guys. Congrats on getting the job right this far.
Hey, it feels faster to me, but is that perhaps just because most people haven't caught up with the DNS changes and are going somewhere else? Have we lucky few just got a private slashdot server?
:)
I'll reserve judgement until normal load is restored.
But hey - looks like a smooth changeover. Well done.
Wasting your time since 1997.
The data format of http://slashdot.org/slashdot.xml has been changed! It broke my slashdot headlines generating script, becuase the <url> tag does not have the full URL!!
Please Fix..