Welcome to the New Server

Welcome to the new server guys. We made the switch late last night, and at this point, it appears that most of your DNS servers have caught up. (For those of you who haven't, hang in there, it should sort out before the day is out). We're sorting out the kinks as they show up, but for the most part, besides the DNS not being all here, we're pretty much set. As a minor system note, for those of you running scripts on Slashdot, please be careful. A couple of you are abusing Slashdot by running scripts that load the backend files (and please note that ultramode is deprecated: see the the code page for info on the new xml backends) excessively (2 people are loading the files more than 20 times a minute, when the files only update every half hour or so. I'm gonna ban IPs if you don't chill out! Anyway, hit the link below for some info on the new setup.

The first thing was to split the SQL off from the httpd. The mysql server now resides on a dedicated dual P2. It runs all the programs that handle keeping the HTML up to date, and NFS exports a nice file system to 3 other boxes (each is a single processor P2) that run httpd (and thats about it). Your hits are routed through an Alteon which divides the hits up amongst the 3 boxes.

The end result is that almost no code changes need to be made. There are tons of things we could do to make it faster still, but we'll look at that when we need it. During load testing this setup was able to handle 3x the load of the existing box.

The major remaining bottleneck is the banner ad frame load time. Browsers like to delay page rendering until they have the HTML for any included layers. For this reason we're going to work out a way to embed the ad HTML directly into the page and sidestep the need for layers. This ought to provide a nice improvement in page render time as well.

Anyway, thanks to all the guys who helped load test the new system before it went live (and if any of you are still running any scripts, you can stop now ;). Thanks to Andover for making this possible, and especially thanks to Peter and CowboyNeal for all your work.

Let us know if you notice anything funky.