Server move on 8th or 10th November

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Meph
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Re: Server move on 8th or 10th November

Post by Meph »

Unas wrote:Well, if I say "rather expensive", it means that I'm paying it :-P
Sorry, I missed that bit. :P But that's good news. I haven't noticed any problems yet, so I think our problems are definitely over, now; touch wood.
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Re: Server move on 8th or 10th November

Post by Unas »

Meph wrote:I haven't noticed any problems yet, so I think our problems are definitely over, now; touch wood.
Well, the server worked for 9 day before the last crash, so I'd wait for a week or so before celebrating :-P
But it is running very well so far :wink:
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Re: Server move on 8th or 10th November

Post by Broocevelt »

Well the forums load a lot faster for me, almost instantly. I don't know if that's because of the update.

EDIT: I rectify. Not "almost" instantly. Instantly.
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Re: Server move on 8th or 10th November

Post by Unas »

Danielinhoni wrote:Well the forums load a lot faster for me, almost instantly. I don't know if that's because of the update.
Yes, it most likely is ;-)
Now that the server has much more memory than it needs, it uses the extra to cache the most used files from the hard drive. Since RAM accesses are much faster than disk accesses, the whole page loading process goes faster :-)
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Re: Server move on 8th or 10th November

Post by Phantom »

I woulda just used CloudFlare, :P
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Re: Server move on 8th or 10th November

Post by Unas »

Something like that might be useful, but unrelated in this case.
Cloudfare acts as a local cache for static files, like the music and pictures. Probably useful on something quite media-heavy like AAO, but that wouldn't have helped the current problem.

What was slowing down the server were running applications, here the web server, php interpreter and database, that execute dynamic pages.
Cloudfare cannot cache dynamic content - thankfully, because if it did, it would lead to inconsistent states for what users see around the world (people seeing different posts on the forums at the same time, etc.).


No, if I really wanted AAO to be a distributed application, I'd rewrite its server code in Java or Python and rely on the Google App Engine system - which really distributes the whole application over the world and takes care of ensuring database consistency.
But rewriting the whole site and forum code in Java is not part of my plans :-P
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Re: Server move on 8th or 10th November

Post by henke37 »

Unas wrote:I'm investigating at the moment.

As for the 404, it's actually not the worst thing : here, it just meant that I disabled the website for a while to go checking on the backend server configuration. At least, when you see a 404, it means the server behind is still running :-P
No, that's status 503, Service Unavailable. A 404 means that the url is bad or that the server doesn't want to tell you what the real error is.
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Re: Server move on 8th or 10th November

Post by Unas »

Henke, given that I configured the server, I think I'm pretty much qualified to know what it answers in which case :-P
Let's just say that if the server runs fine, but the document root is set to an empty directory instead of the one with AAO's files, then requests will return 404 ;-)
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