Hey guys. I just wanted to give you an update on the upcoming changes we've got planned for the site. A month or two ago, after being frustrated at how limited our access to LMR's webserver was, I messaged Frits and offered to host the website on my own server. That way we would have the access to develop all the kinds of things we have in mind to continue improving the site and implementing all the great ideas we get.
After doing some testing, though, it turned out that my current server isn't up to the task of hosting both my site and LMR without getting too slow. So I ordered a brand new, more powerful server that should be up to the task without a problem. I'm currently working on configuring that new server, and once it's ready, we'll be moving the site over there.
For the geeks here (who am I kidding, that's all of us :), here's the stats on the old server and the new one. The current machine is a single-core Athlon XP 3000+ (2.1 GHz, 512 KB cache) with 1 GB RAM and two 80 GB hard disks. The new machine is a Core 2 Duo E6750 (two 2.66 GHz cores, 4mb cache) with 2 GB RAM and one 250 GB hard disk.
I'll be keeping you guys up to date on the transition, and eventually we may be setting up a development blog to keep all these sorts of posts centralized. I want to keep you in the loop and involved with the status of the site, because this site belongs to all of us.
Curiosity Thanks for th update, TCG. Out of curiousity, just for the geeks among us (who are you kidding, that’s ALL of us) what size is the LMR content att he moment? Can the database be considered seperately from Drupal for these purposes?
Oh, bandwidth won’t be a problem The server has an unrestricted 10mbps network connection, and we are allowed 2000 GB/month. LMR currently consumes about 30 GB/month, so we’ve got a bit of room to grow in that respect
Sure thing. The Drupal content (site scripts, etc) is 39 MB. The MySQL database is another 25 MB. The user-uploaded files (pictures of robots etc) are about 200 MB.
That’d be a great idea from a performance standpoint, but it’s not feasible financially. I’ll be making another post later explaining the cost breakdown etc, but in summary, each of these servers costs me $160/month, so I can’t afford to keep both of them online I’m paying for both this month, while I transfer everything over, but I’ll be cancelling the old one as soon as I get everything running on the new one.
Running the website and database server on the same machine shouldn’t be a problem. Neither my website nor LMR are yet at the point where something like that is necessary. One of the main limitations on the old server was RAM – I was allocating about 512 MB of that 1 GB for MySQL, and the other 512 MB for Apache. MySQL ran just fine with its 512 MB, but Apache wasn’t as happy – it couldn’t open very many child processes without swapping, which was limiting how many HTTP requests could be handled simultaneously. With twice the RAM on the new machine, I’ll still be using 512 MB for MySQL (since that worked fine), and we’ll have a full 1.5 GB to dedicate to Apache, so we’ll be able to handle many more simultaneous requests.
I though the first few figures were quite small. Then I got to the uploads…! Interesting to see the breakdown. I trust all our robots are in the SQL part of that and the Drupal content is basically the look and feel of the site?
Yup, that’s exactly right. The vast majority of that ‘drupal content’ is just the stock Drupal installation, with a few custom CSS files etc in one directory. All of our blog posts, robot entries, etc are in the database.
