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New server. Forum software upgraded

Martin

Martin

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We've started migrating to a new server. To not cause any downtime we're already connecting to the new server's SQL server and I'll switch over the nameservers to the new server shortly, probably during the day.

Not a whole lot different with the new server hardware wise (8 core Xeon CPU, 32 GB RAM, 2 x 3 TB Enterprise SATA HDDs in RAID 1, 1 Gbit/s) but it's using the latest stable Debian (we used Debian 7.9 before) and a lot of updated software. So we're using Apache 2.4 instead of 2.2, MariaDB 10 instead of MySQL 5.5, PHP 5.6 instead of 5.4 etc. So there's some added stability, security and hopefully a bit speedier.

I've also upgraded to the latest vBulletin version (our forum software).

If you find any bugs, let me know

Update: EmuTalk database tables converted from MyISAM to XtraDB/InnoDB, should increase performance a bit now that we're using MariaDB.
 
NES_player4LIFE

NES_player4LIFE

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[MENTION=2]Martin[/MENTION]
Thanks for the info. Could you tell us how much space we have on the drives, I'm sure it's quite a bit but I would like to know for sure.
 
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Martin

Martin

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NES_player4LIFE said:
@Martin
Thanks for the info. Could you tell us how much space we have on the drives, I'm sure it's quite a bit but I would like to know for sure.
Click to expand...

Sure. EmuTalk uses about 15 GB of data plus a 1 GB database. Emulation64 uses about 2 GB of data and a small database.

We have about 800 GB free space for all of the websites so no worries there mate :)
 
NES_player4LIFE

NES_player4LIFE

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Martin said:
Sure. EmuTalk uses about 15 GB of data plus a 1 GB database. Emulation64 uses about 2 GB of data and a small database.

We have about 800 GB free space for all of the websites so no worries there mate :)
Click to expand...

Wow! Were not even close to tapping one of the disks! :)
Although the math seems a bit funny:
2 x 3 TB Enterprise SATA HDDs in RAID 1
Click to expand...
We should have 5+ TB's free?
 
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Martin

Martin

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NES_player4LIFE said:
Wow! Were not even close to tapping one of the disks! :)
Although the math seems a bit funny:

We should have 5 TB's free?
Click to expand...

Ah yes but the HDDs are in a RAID 1 configuration meaning the HDDs are mirrored in case one HDD fails. So it's a fail safe. In case one HDD goes bad, we can switch it out and resync the data so again the same data is stored on both drives. So the total capacity is 3 TB actually.

Anyway, around 1 TB of the HDD is used for the sites so there's one partition for that. Then some is reserved for other parts of the system, like Linux OS and server applications, databases storage, local backups etc. Then we have a couple of partitions for temporary files. And so on :)

Either way we have more space than we actually will ever need. :)
 
NES_player4LIFE

NES_player4LIFE

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Martin said:
Ah yes but the HDDs are in a RAID 1 configuration meaning the HDDs are mirrored in case one HDD fails. So it's a fail safe. In case one HDD goes bad, we can switch it out and resync the data so again the same data is stored on both drives. So the total capacity is 3 TB actually.

Anyway, around 1 TB of the HDD is used for the sites so there's one partition for that. Then some is reserved for other parts of the system, like Linux OS and server applications, databases storage, local backups etc. Then we have a couple of partitions for temporary files. And so on :)

Either way we have more space than we actually will ever need. :)
Click to expand...

Thanks for the clarification.

I was just thinking, would there be any benefit to writing system information to a SSD for faster reading/page loading?
Pages and forum databases may also gain faster load-time, data and uploads should be kept on the traditional HDD do to capacity and I/O's

EDIT: I just got a 503 and a 502 error whilst refreshing the page.
 
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Martin

Martin

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NES_player4LIFE said:
Thanks for the clarification.

I was just thinking, would there be any benefit to writing system information to a SSD for faster reading/page loading?
Pages and forum databases may also gain faster load-time, data and uploads should be kept on the traditional HDD do to capacity and I/O's
Click to expand...

Absolutely, there's an advantage speed wise. But there's also a disadvantage. Life length.

In a server like this the data is constantly read and written, SSDs compared to SATA drives have a much more limited number of write cycles. It could benefit for data that's not very often written though (like static files) but there we have a very efficient cache server that deliver the files incredibly fast (although not at this very minute, I'm running some database checks :D)
 
NES_player4LIFE

NES_player4LIFE

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That's my biggest concern with SSD's.
I myself have a SSD dedicated to win7 and other system programs, my data, user files, and non-system info is stored on a HDD.

Emulation64 also benefits from the 32GB of DDR3 RAM. So I guess a SSD would be foolish.
 
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Martin

Martin

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Oh yeah for some stuff SSD is fantastic, like my laptop. A while ago I put in a 120 GB SSD in this Macbook which is from 2008. It used to be pretty slow. Now it's much, much quicker, especially booting up and starting Photoshop and whatnot.
 
NES_player4LIFE

NES_player4LIFE

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I love booting PS from my SSD! Just be sure not to use the SSD as a scratch disk. It will burn it out in no time at all.
 
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Martin

Martin

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Anyone else had problems connecting before? I restarted the services, will take a look at the logs tonight. Maybe it was just temporary
 
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Martin

Martin

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Administrator
Martin said:
Anyone else had problems connecting before? I restarted the services, will take a look at the logs tonight. Maybe it was just temporary
Click to expand...

Quoting myself here but I found the reason, just editing some server settings now. :p

The apache settings for the new server were set too modest so new connections could not be made. I'll monitor it tonight as well.
 
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