Well...this is somewhat anticlimactic...
 

Not that it's unexpected, but I feel mildly let down with the new server. I mean, we don't really have any new toys to play with in terms of features or anything. It just works. I've gotten so use to screwing with it in the background every night that now it's like I don't have anything to do.

Don't get me wrong - it's a good thing - just not as much fun as it seems like it should be. Maybe I need to find some new stupid add-on to install just for fun. :D

:sulk:

Or maybe take up knitting? Or drinking? Something to pass the time.

It might have been posted some where but I missed. What hardware and OS platforms are we on now?

...

Did you guys actually figure out what was wrong? Or did you just decide to send the old server to Davey Jones (or his locker)?

More time to download porn

you could start messing with trolls

We just outgrew the old server, basically. On the technical side, the main issue was RAM. We were on a 32-bit operating system, which only allows 2GB of RAM to be allocated to a single application. Ideally, you want our database backend (MySQL) to have enough memory allocated to it so that all of the indexes can be held in RAM all of the time. For example, when it runs a search, you want the search index to be in RAM so that it doesn't have to parse through millions of posts on the hard drive, which is much slower. We were only able to allocate about 1.5GB to MySQL, and we had a total of around 2GB of indexes, so it was having to use the hard drive for queries a lot more than is healthy.

Our new system has 12GB of RAM and is on a 64-bit OS, so we can allocate pretty much all of it to MySQL if we want to. The way it's configured right now, MySQL gets around 8GB, while everything else gets 4GB (as much as the old server had in total). We'll be tweaking the memory settings as time goes on, but that's the basic idea.

(Hey...you asked.)

Did you upgrade the OS as well?

Small upgrade. We're on RedHat 5.5 now. I think we were on 5.1 or 5.2 before. Plus we went from 32-bit to 64-bit. Other stuff (mySQL, PHP, apache) was upgraded accordingly.

I want tags or let me be a mod.
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Yes, I did ask.

Well from my end it feels awesome....I used to get a ton of lag and it was very frustrating at times....I haven't felt any of that at all...Plus with being able to search it is really really kick ass.

I thank you very much for the time and effort! It is kind of like winning a game of chess (I relate everything to chess LOL):

You can play a good game of chess against a good player really without doing anything really 'brilliant' but the minute you do something wrong, a good player will notice......and you will be summarily destroyed.

The shit that you do behind the scenes to make our site run smooth might not get noticed, but if shit doesn't run smooth you will surely hear about it LOL!

I want some kind of add-on where I can float a battleship around the screen and shoot at other posters.

I can see a big difference so far. Hopefully more RAM and 64 bit will make the difference. I was starting to wonder if there was an issue with the DB so hopefully this will take care of things.

I'm a z/OS and AIX guy so I wouldn't be any help. Congrats to all you guys that are working behind the curtains for the rest of us. If I ever get a chance to buy you guys a beverage they're all on me.