doctorwho said:
Yay! New server!
Last night was fine, until the songs from the April 1st concert were being uploaded onto YSI. Suddenly the ol' "server is too busy" errors occurred. What's odd about that is the timing: it was midnight on Sat. on the east coast of the U.S. This means it was early morning in Europe and also very late elsewhere in the U.S. So it really surprised me that the server would be bogged down with people mostly looking at webpages, given the time of day it was and the fact that they weren't replying as much as they were just reading. It just seems this server can't take much abuse. 
First, let me explain something....
The forum isnt the only part of this site that generates traffic. That said, as I've said previously... the entire site is run on a single massive database, like most data.... it's stored on a harddisk
... essentially what happens is that when A LOT of people all make database queries it accesses the disk rapidly... and occassionly these queries are actually sent faster than the disk (not the processor) can handle them. When this happens, queries (or the data access calls to the disk) queue up, waiting for the disk (and data) to become available... thus causing a slow down, or what appears to be one. During this time, people keep slamming the server, pressing refresh, loading new pages, etc etc..... and the queue just builds, and builds, until it can catch up with its proper pace. Those familiar with tech lingo would say that this is a 'disk I/O problem'. The new server, which is being built now, has MUCH faster harddisks... over twice the overall speed and performance.
IF/WHEN we outgrow the new server EVENTUALLY.... lol... which undoubtedly we will unless U2 break up sometime soon.... I'll most likely move to a server cluster... which is multiple servers acting as one. That option is quite costly, and wont be considered until/unless it's needed.
The new server will handle our needs.... the demanding U2 freaks we are.
Joel
didn't we just get a new server?
