New Hardware & Software Platform

[Greg]

After many issues over the last number of months, we have spent the last 2 weeks behind the scenes revamping our server platform.

Alot has changed - mainly the server hardware we utilise has changed alot, we have moved from soho quality SATA drives to an Enterprise class Fiber SAN powered by 15krpm SCSI drives. We have upgraded our Database server to 8Gb of RAM, and tweaked and tuned our front end servers to the max.

We will be connecting our SQL/Database servers to the SAN in the middle of December so that is when we are aiming for our peak performance/stability.

You HOPEFULLY will notice the pageload speed increases, and we are now hoping the major upgrades will leave us with the next year without a glitch in uptime, as we have been experiencing erratic outages on the site & forums for some time now.

For the time being however, we have had to lock down guest logins, as the Yahoo & Google spiders have been attributed to attempting to read upto 1000 pages at a time during peak periods, causing our previous servers to go nuts! This will be changed again after mid December.

Anyway, happy browsing and as always, leave feedback in this thread

Cheers,

Greg

[Pharaoh Atem]

as of this posting there is still a little lag the forum opens fine but if you click on a thread there is a lag while trying to open it

ADD

See my updated post. Just kicked out guests for the time being unfortunatelly.

IMO good guests have always cause us probelms it seems

[rarocks24]

Forum is a bit quicker. Did get an error once so far when attempting to enter My Controls.



But went into control panel fine and all after I went back and clicked it again.

[Greg]

Forum is a bit quicker. Did get an error once so far when attempting to enter My Controls.



But went into control panel fine and all after I went back and clicked it again.

See my updated post. Just kicked out guests for the time being unfortunatelly.

[Greg]

as of this posting there is still a little lag the forum opens fine but if you click on a thread there is a lag while trying to open it

That is because the DB is so large our slow hdds take a while to read through all the data to get to it. That will change with our new HDD's shortly

[PG15]

Hehe, Enterprise Class...

Good luck Greg, and don't work too hard!

[rarocks24]

Have they found a way around the locking? The forum says we have 590 guests.

[Arga]

all these evolutions are good news! Thanks!

It wakes up a question I had at the back of my head.. Who is paying for all these? the revenue from the advertisements on top of the page is enough? I don't see any sign of "Donation link", like we see everywhere on Wikipedia for exemple.
I've been wondering this. Is Gateworld still part of your "hobbies" or is it a full time activity now?

Keep up the good work!

[Pharaoh Atem]

Have they found a way around the locking? The forum says we have 590 guests.

that 590 guest starring at the you can't come in sorry message

[Pharaoh Atem]

now I'm noticing a BIG speed improvement

[Greg]

Probably because we just booted about 400+ Yahoo bots off the site

[Pharaoh Atem]

Probably because we just booted about 400+ Yahoo bots off the site

sorry but what do you mean by bots ????

[Arga]

Probably because we just booted about 400+ Yahoo bots off the site

sorry but what do you mean by bots ????

short for Robot, right? the automatic connections invading a web site.

[Pharaoh Atem]

short for Robot, right? the automatic connections invading a web site.

i know what a robot is but how do there effect gw

[PG15]

They're like extra members, I suppose.

[LaCroix]

I have a quick question. Did the new platforms effect the last post function and thread/forum read ones as well?

Or am I doing something wrong?

[rarocks24]

A bot is a computer automatically looking at the site. The more people that look at a site, the more the site's bandwidth gets eaten up.

[Pharaoh Atem]

so what happen today .....more cleaning of bots

[Greg]

We were attempting to kick alive our backup services that provides us with our 4 hourly database backups, but the system failed.

Please be prepared for another few-hrs long outage later in the week.

[rarocks24]

Greg...perhaps you can answer this, I've gotten this about twice today.



Once was on my school server, so I simply wrote it off as the school interfering, but I just got this message about two minutes ago at my house. I use a Mac, so I don't even have Bullguard.