There is nothing else I can do right at this moment to improve usability of the site.
The Internet's attention span can not last much longer....I hope.
There are potentially several bottlenecks where things are hanging, some can be addressed with some hardware upgrades, others maybe more complicated to figure out.
I don't think we are at a do or die stage for getting this figured out, as the vast majority of this is "drive-by" traffic that should probably lesson considerably in a matter of days.
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Out of interest, do you know what the major bottleneck is? Network bandwidth/Disk bandwidth/RAM (swapping)/CPU?
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately its not clear. The only thing that we are clearly approaching the limit of is RAM. RAM is cheap might as well upgrade that, it can't hurt right?
ReplyDeleteThe CPU doesn't appear to under much duress, there very well might be some network bandwidth issues either with my max upload speed, or even maximum concurrent connections.
Oh, really, it's RAM rather than CPU? I'd have thought it'd be CPU since MediaWiki's arse is so fat.
ReplyDelete(I suggested Varnish to Nx with the aim of cutting CPU. I'm fiddling with a new MW 1.16beta install at work and might shove Varnish in front of that just to see how it goes.)
The load capacity for the CPU is averaging less than 1 on a duo core setup.
ReplyDeleteThere maybe some bottle necks in Apache or MYSQL as well.
I think doubling up are RAM is probably a good investment, and to be honest the hard drive we are using is a tad outdated as far as its transfer rate and cache.
Heh, yes. What's the spec of the box it's running on?
ReplyDeleteDual CPU E2200 2.20GHz
ReplyDelete2 GB RAM
Ubuntu 8.10 32 bit
Roughly the upgrade plan at the moment is pick up 4 gigs of RAM and a new harddrive (higher cache, and transfer rate, maybe higher RPM).
At this point we can install the new Ubuntu 64 bit OS, transfer over the files and database, drop in the memory, do some voodoo chanting, and voila.
Hell yes. As much memory as you can afford that will fit.
ReplyDeleteAfford is an operative word.
ReplyDeleteThe much alluded to play boy life style of grad students is vastly over stated.
Hey, grad students get to feed from the stuff the postdocs spill over the side when they're rummaging through the dumpster. The undergrads don't even get that much!
ReplyDeleteTrent, check the motherboard if it supports that much memory. Some older boards only support 4 gigs despite being 64 bit.
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised you're using Ubuntu. I assumed you'd be using Redhat or some other server-specific distro.
ReplyDeleteUbuntu has a server edition, although I think we have the desktop edition right now.
ReplyDeleteI've heard that 64-bit Ubuntu has stability issues (well, more than other OSes anyways). If/when we move to 64-bit, is this something we should be concerned about? (Or would it only come up if Trent uses the server to peruse flash-based sites? : ))
ReplyDelete"I've heard that 64-bit Ubuntu has stability issues (well, more than other OSes anyways)."
ReplyDeleteWhat in particular?
What spec of RAM would be used in that box?
ReplyDeleteCan you configure mediawiki to completely cache particluar landing pages, such as the ones being hit by the FriendFace traffic, to reduce the processing the server has to perform?
ReplyDeleteEaccelerator and Memcache do that for us all ready.
ReplyDeleteThis things can't really be used though for some of the other high traffic areas of the site like saloon bar, or wigo CP
To take it a step further you could redirect static content like images to the Coral CDN (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_Content_Distribution_Network), that should definitely reduce the servers work load. I've used it on a few database driven sites to redirect all images even site graphics to Coral and saw a huge decrease in server load and bandwidth.
ReplyDeleteWhat about resurrecting the old non-mw forums and destroying the saloon bar and mw forums?
ReplyDelete