Hey guys,
Just letting you know that the site is going to be going through the process of being moved to a new server (with two hexa-core processors and 16GB of ram) over the next 2-3 days, and that this may lead to some times when the site will be slow, deathly slow, or possibly not available at all for a time.
I'm of course going to try and ensure there's as little downtime as possible, and honestly I don't expect any significant issues. The main bottleneck is going to be copying files from the main hard disk, as this is slow as all hell when it's heavily loaded (being a physical disk and all) - but I'll do my best to mitigate the effects of this.
Good news is this migration is going to roll into one a whole ton of important improvements, including:
1. More RAM and a different Ruby on Rails application controller, which should substantially reduce 'random downtime' due to running out of memory.
2. Raid 1 for the system's main hard disk, which should make it faster to recover from a dead drive (ie, no need to do a bare-metal restore from backup if the drive dies)
3. three times the amount of processing power of the previous server, which should SUBSTANTIALLY improve performance during peak times.
4. A new operating system for the e621 virtual machine, this time being CentOS instead of Debian. This should signficantly reduce downtime by not crashing with a 'time went backwards' error for no reason, and should make the site substantially easier to administer.
Thank you everyone for your patience - and to Aurali for her tireless work to improve the e621 codebase!
Any questions or comments? Post 'em below!
Varka
Updated by Solovar