Author Archives: drbrain

We’ll be getting the last 4GB of memory into our new database server sometime between Friday 10PM Pacific Time and Saturday 2AM Pacific Time.

Hooray!

The new database server dors is up and running smoothly. Here’s a bit of information about it:

• Hardware
  • Dual Dual-Core Opteron 246 (four physical CPUs in two chips)
  • 8GB RAM (we’ll be upgrading to 12GB RSN™)
  • Five Ultra160 10k RPM disks using RAID 5
• Software
  • OS: FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE
    • Running in amd64 mode
    • 4BSD Scheduler
  • DB: Mysql 4.1.16
    • Statically Linked
    • Using libthr

I’m taking us to a bigger, faster database server, and I’ll keep you all up to date right here.

Updates:

1. Ok, dumping the DBs
2. Databases dumped, importing data into the new machine.
3. Half the tables imported
4. Databases restored, reconfiguring the sites
5. Done, if you see anything weird, leave a comment.

We’ll be bringing a new database server online tonight, so starting at 8PM Pacific Time the site will be down for at least an hour, possibly as much as two hours.

The new machine is big and powerful and will make all the sites go much faster, allowing us to handle growth better than ever before.

On Thursday around 6:00 PM PST our hosting provider is upgrading our firewall, so we’ll experience about 10 minutes of downtime.

UPDATE:

We’re up and running now. We might have a spot of downtime again tonight for some database tweaking, all in search of making the site faster.

UPDATE 2:

Bob tweaked the database, so things should get much zippier now.

I brought hal online today, and everything seems to be running smoothly. There were a few hours where hal wasn’t able to upload images, but he should be all good now.