Note from Jason about DM8

[SBoydW]

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

[Danh]

No matter how much I play with the settings (level, sensitivity, threshold, etc.) it seems that Tom 1 just isn't as sensitive as the other toms.