Server Upgrade Coming!

[Scott Greczkowski]

Hard to believe we already maxed out our server! So here we grow again!

Currently SatelliteGuys runs a a Dual XEON 2.4 Ghz Machine with 2 GIG of RAM and two 60 GIG IDE Drives.

Our databse currently serves 125+ Databse queries a second. Because we are running off of IDE drives this is bogging down the server and causing high server loads.

I have talked with our server guru LER and we have decided to take SatellliteGuys to the next step and move us to a new dream machine!

We have looked at various specs and here are the specs we have decided on.

• Dual XEON 2.8 GHZ
• 4 Gigabytes of ECC Registered RAM
• 3 x 73GIG SCSI Hard Drives
• HARDWARE BASED RAID 5 with 32 MB Cache
• CPANEL Control Software
• 2 Terabytes of Data Transfer

This server will cost a lot more then what we are paying now, but because of the Generosity of our supporting Pub Members and from the support of our advertisors including DishStore.NET, ValueElectronics.COM, VOOM and also to GOOGLE and IntelliTxt (I can't express how important all these guys are to us)

The server is being ordered today, we should have the server within 24 to 48 hours. I will then begin moving parts of the site over to the new server and we should be completely on the new server by February 1st.

We will work hard to keep outtages to a minimum, most of the server moving will happen at night after 8PM EST. We will make announcements before doing major work.

I find this to be very exciting and I thank each and every one of you for making SatelliteGuys the huge success it has become in just over a year!

 

[korsjs]

this is great news. truely shows how this site is growing. i am very proud to be a pub member here.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

I am so excited about the new server. I think the SCSI and Raid 5 will make a huge difference on performance, and it also offers us better data security and backup options.

I think I figured out a way to do the upgrade and move to the new server with almost no downtime and also no interuption due to DNS changes.

 

[Stargazer]

Congradulations on the success of the site. Needing this upgrade is good news.

 

[Neutron]

Which OS will it be running?

 

[BFG]

I hope the transitions will almost be complete It was down last night

 

[korsjs]

I am so excited about the new server. I think the SCSI and Raid 5 will make a huge difference on performance, and it also offers us better data security and backup options.

I think I figured out a way to do the upgrade and move to the new server with almost no downtime and also no interuption due to DNS changes.

don't konw what all that stuff means, but it sounds good.

 

[TuxCoder]

I am so excited about the new server. I think the SCSI and Raid 5 will make a huge difference on performance...

korsjs, I read that as a direct challenge to us.
Browse harder, and post faster!

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

We will be moving from Redhat 9.0 to Redhat Enterprise Server 3.0.

As for being down last night, something happened to the nightly backup it got stuck. I reset it at 4am this morning because I was tired of hearing my pager go off.

 

[Neutron]

Do those dual Xeon processors have EMT64 code in them to allow for 64-bit?

 

[LER]

Do those dual Xeon processors have EMT64 code in them to allow for 64-bit?

Not to my knowledge. We shouldn't need 64-bit for a while yet

LER

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

I just got an update from our host ThePlanet on our new server. The new server is in the process of built however they are waiting for a RAID card from Dell for the unit. That card should be in today or worse case tommorow.

I asked them about the speed diffrences between RAID1 and RAID5 and was told that the RAID card used on the RAID 5 system was MUCH better then the raid card they use on their raid 1 system. And that on the tests they have done the performance was better on the RAID 5 because of the extra caching. So we should be good there.

I should also note that I backed out the changes vBulletin made to our system on Friday night. Since the changes have been made our server seems to go from a 2.0 server load to a 65.0 server load at 1:30am making it appear that the server has crashed. However whats really going on is CPANEL is updating itself and backup is also kicking in. Once the Cpanel update and backup complete the server returns to normal loads. But it appears we are down for up to 3 hours.

Last night my pager went off to alert me of the problems and I aborted the cpanel update and backup. I then did a mysqldump backup of our databases. and downloaded them to my home computer, so we were backed up.

Let's hope that by backing out of the vBulletin changes made that it eliminates this problem, if it still continues to happen I will contact CPanel, the good news however is if its fixed or not in a few days we will be cruising on our new server.

Thanks everyone for your patience and support!

 

[TuxCoder]

Hehe I didn't do it