Help Slashdot Test Our New Data Center

After many years of living in California, Slashdot is preparing to move to a new data center in Chicago, and we need your help. We have our new site running a dump of our database from a few days ago. You can hit it at beta.slashdot.org. Please go there, post comments, submit stories, and do whatever you do normally. Or maybe abnormally — run crawlers, write poll spamming robots or something. If you find any crazy issues, please submit them to our sourceforge tracker. If you're curious, the new system features 18 2x quad-core 2.3 GHz webservers each with 8 gigs of RAM, and 4 quad-core 2.3 GHz databases with 16 gigs of RAM.

Comments

new account

[altair1230]

I couldn't create a new account on beta.slashdot.org

Re:new account

[kesuki]

okay i've tried 4 of my slashdot accounts, in opera for linux, and none of them lets me log into beta.slashdot.org...

mine was low 6 digits..
the rest were in the high 6 digits...

tried with wand asking, enabled and disables, as well as 'public terminal' checked, no dice, can't log in with opera at all.

Re:Obligitory

[tkid]

Did you read the history of Slashdot when it hit 10 year anniversary mark? I think someone should go read and stop asking silly questions.

Re:Tracerouted

[Joe The Dragon]

I get 10ms

Re:Abnormally?

[FooAtWFU]

Apache benchmarker. If you have the right packages installed (e.g. 'apache2-utils' on Debian) it certainly exists on any Linux distro worth its salt.

Re:More info about the hardware?

[Precision]

On the Web servers, the specs are

Dual Quad Core Intel E5345 with RAID 1 of 2xSATA drives

On the Database boxes

Single Quad Core Intel E5345 with RAID 5 of 7xSAS drives w/ a hot spare

All machines are 2xGigE connected to cabinet switches which are 10G connected to our cores and our Dual 10G uplinks

Re:Tracerouted

[mnslinky]

wow, 5 fewer hops to me, with about half the latency

Re:Slashdot hardware specs...

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course it will. If you're not curious you're not getting anywhere close to your normal share of fun.

Re:Power consumption?

[AKAImBatman]

What's the power consumption on this set up?

Probably less than you'd expect. Intel's latest line of Quad-core Xeon processors use 45nm fab technology. If these are 2.33GHz "Harpertown" chips, then each chip (not core!) uses only ~50 watts. That means these machines could be running in as little as 150 watts for the dual processor machines, and 250 watts for the quad processor machines. (Though the quad core machines are most likely drawing a lot more power than that for a full RAID array.) Which really isn't too shabby.

Re:Obligitory

[__aanjtz122]

$ lynx -dump -head http://beta.slashdot.org/ | grep Server

Server: Apache/1.3.41 (Unix) mod_perl/1.31-rc4

So that's one question answered :-)

Re:Tracerouted

[Anubis350]

I'm in NYC, dropped latency rather impressively from 96ms to 36ms, dropped hops from 16 to 13, all depends on where you live and what networks your traffic is going over

Re:Weaker Databases?

[jpbelang]

I remember a USENIX talk about Altavista's servers and they had many more web servers than DB servers (like 3 to 1).

So I'm not surprised.

Re:Power consumption?

[legoman666]

And that's only if they're at 100% load, which they won't be except in rare cases.

Re:Ah, the Data Center robbery center of America!

[hakr89]

They're not being hosted out of CI Host, they're being hosted out of Savvis.

Re:Obligitory

[Hatta]

iblis% sudo nmap -A -T4 beta.slashdot.org

Starting Nmap 4.53 ( http://insecure.org/ ) at 2008-05-23 15:00 CDT
SCRIPT ENGINE: rpcinfo.nse is not a file.
SCRIPT ENGINE: Aborting script scan.
Interesting ports on beta.slashdot.org (216.34.181.45):
Not shown: 1704 closed ports
PORT STATE SERVICE VERSION
21/tcp open tcpwrapped
25/tcp filtered smtp
80/tcp open http Apache httpd 1.3.41 ((Unix) mod_perl/1.31-rc4)
135/tcp filtered msrpc
136/tcp filtered profile
137/tcp filtered netbios-ns
138/tcp filtered netbios-dgm
139/tcp filtered netbios-ssn
443/tcp open ssl/http Apache httpd 1.3.41 ((Unix) mod_perl/1.31-rc4)
445/tcp filtered microsoft-ds
Device type: general purpose
Running (JUST GUESSING) : OpenBSD 4.X (91%)
Aggressive OS guesses: OpenBSD 4.1 (x86) (91%), OpenBSD 4.0 - 4.2 (90%), OpenBSD 4.0 (88%), OpenBSD 4.0 (x86) (86%)
No exact OS matches for host (test conditions non-ideal).
Network Distance: 10 hops

TRACEROUTE (using port 21/tcp)
HOP RTT ADDRESS
1 0.25 beta.slashdot.org (216.34.181.45)

OS and Service detection performed. Please report any incorrect results at http://insecure.org/nmap/submit/ .
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 32.605 seconds

Looks like they're running OpenBSD of some sort.

Re:Obligitory

[livingdeadline]

Netcraft thinks it's an F5 BIG-IP device, which probably means that they've got a big, fancy load balancer. If my memory doesn't fail me, F5's appliance OS is BSD based.

Re:Tracerouted

[the_one(2)]

I get 16 hops from sweden on both. latency is about 40 ms less

Re:Tracerouted

[bram]

try mtr

Re:Power consumption?

[omnipresentbob]

They're all quad core machines. 18 of 'em have 2 quad core processors, and the other 4 lack the extra processor but get more RAM.

It's sorta like, there's 22 guys. 18 of 'em ain't missing nothing, but the other four only have one nut but have more endurance. Though the analogy is a bit off.

Re:Tracerouted

[GumphMaster]

Latency! That ain't latency:

• Current 14 hops 236ms
• New 16 hops 317ms

Figures courtesy of tracepath. The packets have paddled across the Pacific.