[admin (no pm's please)]

I have been promising this for some time, but now is clearly past time to get round to it.

Some forums will be moving away from Slarti and on to Zaphod, Slarti has over 70% more load than Zaphod and Slarti is actually slower!

I'm just creating some tests of the forum moving process before getting on with the job.

[wildgarlic]

We are on slarti I think - is there likely to be any downtime so that I can warn the members?

[admin (no pm's please)]

There should be almost no downtime for a forum. The process goes as follows:

1) The forum will come up as if you as admin have disabled it.
2) The transfer takes place, a matter of seconds to possibly few minutes for very large forums. But it will be the smaller ones targeted for transfer.
3) The board in enabled again.
4) When users go to their forum link, the forum redirects them to a link with "zaphod" in the name. But they do get to a usable forum.
5) Up to 48 hours later the old link starts working again without the "zaphod" bit, as the name has propagated again.

[Symon]

Can i just confirm, that no data will be lost for anyone working on there forum/webpasges at time of moving.

[admin (no pm's please)]

If they are smack in the middle of an edit they will lose that edit.

but the moves will not be taking place at a peak time of day, it will be early hours stuff and so the chances of anyone having a problem is pretty remote.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Moving a forum now passes 9 out of 10 tests.

but of course to take a forum it needs to be complete with its styles,posts,avatars, portals, profile fields, web pages, web templates not to mention a redirection and a dns update....

So anyone of these failing is critical.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Need to reverify all the tests, but a transfer has happened seemingly without error.

Hopefully we will be able to make inroads in this over the next few days.

[gfxlounge]

Has This Hapend?
As I Saw This
http://efcivicsedan.zaphod.myfreeforum.org/

[admin (no pm's please)]

Sometimes  for some odd reason people see the new link and start using it that happened Nov 21 2006!

[admin (no pm's please)]

As a matter of fact 8 active forums have been moved.

Not enough to make a real difference, but done daily it will be relatively short time.

Best not to make wholesale moves until the move process is more road tested.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Another little point of note.

There has been little load balancing so far, but pretty much as the same time of day with the statistics process running (though perhaps crucially not the database backup which was rescheduled an hour earlier) there is no sign of speed problems at all.

It has been this fact that has constantly delayed taking action on the load balancing, we obviously want servers running at a load factor they can take and aside from these odd occasions there is no overload. I would rather have continued trying to deal with the glitch than cop out and remove the load.

However now we have started, we may as well continue to load balance, and obviously the customers concern is speed and not our server configuration issues!

[admin (no pm's please)]

30 moved with no notable impact on load, but then I am only moving forums that are active but have no one currently online.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Over 80 moved now, still not a lot of impact, but it is best to take it steady.

I think the next step will be to a plan to search out and kill all the orphans  

[admin (no pm's please)]

Over a 100 and the telling "zaphod" has now disappeared from the link of the first forum I moved.

It is tempting to move an awful lot, thus leaving us with a lot to spring clean out of the system.

I take the view that it is generally best to leave templates and databases lying around on servers as in the event of something going wrong with a move it is another backup already in place.

But over a couple of years it does build up and whilst disk is cheap backup of excess data is not cheap.

[admin (no pm's please)]

We are showing a 1.4% load reduction on Slarti, an underestimate of the actual load change, but at least the figures are beginning to move.

Meanwhile I think next weeks project will be comprehensive housekeeping suite build around a system that will have a way of queuing actions and showing what would be done rather than simply doing it. One of the reason for putting off the housekeeping routines has been the fear of just what bugs in them could do  

[scottish-jim]

Great work Admin - thanks for keeping us informed

[admin (no pm's please)]

Figures will still lag until the weekly web server restart, but we are now showing a 5% load reduction. That might be enough to sort issues as there is a thin boundary between a server trundling along speedily and beginning to occasionally grind to a halt. All the same as already stated there is little point stopping this exercise until Slarti has the lightest load of all the servers.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Almost 20% of active forums on Slarti have been moved. Though as it is smaller forums being moved that means considerably less than 20$ of the load.

I am beginning to think that the actual issues prompting the exercise may be related to this:

http://www.avg-watch.org/


AVG could seeming cause traffic spikes and it is spikes that push servers over the edge if they don't have the spare capacity.

[Nick(NR)]

[admin (no pm's please)]

Load reduction is now at 15%. So we have gone from Slarti having 70% more load than Zaphod down to 25% more load. Still some ways to go, but very much headway made.

[admin (no pm's please)]

I need to add the ability to remove old phpbb2 databases where a phpbb3 upgrade has taken place, but aside from that the housekeeping code is looking good, at least in the office.

I don't think I will deploy it, let alone use it until we are load balanced though.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Now running at just over 10% more load on Slarti than Zaphod. Ideally we want this reversed.

[admin (no pm's please)]

A mere 2.5% difference....I think one more push tomorrow and we will be at the point where Slarti is less loaded than Zaphod.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Within 0.5% now, the wrong way round, but all the same I think this will be left a week to see what happens?

[admin (no pm's please)]

To cap this off the current figures show zaphod at 3.5% more load than Slarti, representing a 23% load decrease on Slarti.