Note From Jason Re: Servers & Performance Mode

[Elgee]

Well I think we got this working now.... *knock on wood*

 

Dragonmount is now running on (2) servers working together. The "saidar" server is our old DM server from DM7. It's running Apache, which is the actual web server. This means that when you go to any page on DM, this is the server you hit, and this is the one which serves you the actual web page.

 

But every single one of our web pages need to access a database. It needs to know if you're logged in, who you are, what you have access to, etc. It also needs to know which banner ad to report back whether or not you clicked it. All of this data is stored in our database. And our database is now stored on the second server, "saidin".

 

For the last few weeks, all of DM8 had been running on saidin. And the bottom line is that with a site as big as ours, with the somewhat older hardware on it, "saidin" just wasn't strong enough to keep things going by itself. I need to give Claire a huge THANK YOU for literally sitting on the server around the clock and keeping an eye on its system load. If the load got too high, she acted quick and rebooted stuff. DM would have been down a lot more frequently if it wasn't for her.

 

Also, Claire worked her butt off to research how to optimize our server and database. The results have been a dramatic improvement. And now that we're offloading a heavy burden from saidin and putting it onto saidar, those changes will still make a big impact.

 

So cross your fingers that this works. I am leaving the site in "Performance Mode" still for another day to ensure our systems remain stable. If things look good 24 hours from now, I will re-enable the full features of the site.

 

Oh, and one more thing. A very generous fan offered to buy us some more RAM. So I'll have another 4 Gig of RAM showing up at my door tomorrow. Between that and the new hard drive I'll be installing on "saidin", our speed and stability should improve even more.

 

Thanks for bearing with me with all these changes as we move into DM8.

 

Jason

[Jaydena]

That is awesome!! Thank you so much Claire for all your hard work and to that generous fan, how cool is that.

[Elgee]

Bumping this since we're back on Performance Mode. This means no PMs, not Profiles, not other shinies and pretties. If we get any further information, we'll let you know.

[Elgee]

... we went into performance mode yesterday. At the moment, the site is being updated with all the new ToM material/reviews etc. As traffic increases over the release date, extras may be switched off to keep the whole site running smoothly.

[Elgee]

Excerpts from admin emails received today from Jason:

 

 

More on this: Our traffic is through the roof. I am able to access the DM sever remotely, but it is super slow. It takes about 5 minutes just to be prompted for my password to the command line. If I can somehow manage to get there and type "reboot", we'll be ok.

 

As I said earlier, I am traveling for the next 2 days for work. My wife can physically reboot the server when she gets home tonight, but that won't be until around 9 PM EST.

 

For longer term fixes, I have a recently recruited IT expert helping us out now as of yesterday. He's been making a lot of suggestions on how to optimize our servers.

 

Yes, I know this is frustrating. Believe me when I say nobody is more frustrated than me. It's constantly on my mind.

 

I'll do what we can.

 

 

 

Also.... if the site is down, DO NOT TRY TO GO THERE AGAIN in the same second. Give it 20 minutes at least.

 

 

 

I think I can get the site back online now. I switched over to saidar, and that allowed saidin to "cool off". I made some adjustments according to what this IT guy (named Jay) suggested. We'll give it a shot. These are good changes. SHould help.