Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I had a phone call the other day from the hosting provider who hosts the forum to inform me that we are using more than our fair share of the CPU. I was given two choices.

1) We change over to their parent company on a different plan where each CPU on the server only has 3 users, so we will get 1/3 of the CPU.

2) We find another hosting provider...

Nice choices.

Of course this is going to cost a fair bit more, and evidently we are still going to be close to using our 1/3 CPU allocation at our current usage. He assures me that I won't need to upgrade it again within the next 6 months or so unless things here increased very suddenly. The next upgrade which will probably have to happen within 12 months will over triple the new hosting price, and effectively be about 10 times the current costs.

It's obviously something they consider quite urgent too because he rang me again today asking when we will do the conversion.

The change over will be happening sometime in the next week or so and this will mean that things will be down for a period of about 4 hours. I'm doing a complete backup of everything at the moment in preparation but they have assured me it will be incredibly smooth and there should be no disruptions apart from the few hours of down time when they change it over.

I will keep you all informed as to exactly when it's going to happen...

Joel

Ever thought of hosting it yourself? Is that even possible?

Then I'd have no one to blame when things go wrong..

I don;t know that it's really feesable.

sure its possible, all you need is a static IP. but there is probably a fair bit of maintenance. better to pay for it elsewhere and be able to blame them

I wouldn't host it myself... the bandwith would be no where near possible on any connection other than a fibre connection and the cost of the down/up would be unimaginable...

This forum is only running on SQL so I can't imagine why it would need 1/3 of a CPU to run it.... It really only the bandwidth which is a concern.

I would strongly suggest that people DON'T tab every single thread on the new posts list... that would help alot... I have 5 tabs from this site atm,
I am not, nor have I ever experienced speed issues on this site... but I know we need to cater for over-east and over-seas members too.

I would suggest mirroring the site... but that would just get really messy.

You need a professional and dedicated hosting service... try westnet or iinet and tell them what throughput are getting now and see what they say...

Ideally you would want two to four corporate grade servers, dual quad-core zeon jobs... With an auto negotiate of user... so basically you are being forwarded to a secondary website,
but sharing the same sql database. OR have a separate databases for each section and use sub-domains to link them. Host them separately... All servers have there own 100 Mbit fibre connections...

Or just run an HP Blade server with openvms clustering....

Automatic load balancing and mirroring of both disk I/O and database I/O...

With automatic failover if a system or a disk array goes down.....

What the heck... I ran the entire NSW Dept of Health system on 6 clustered Vax 6300's...

Every hospital in NSW... plus the Ambulance service..... over 2500 concurrent users....

On OpenVMS..... and that was about 1995

Ran 2000 registered users on a Novell network at WD & HO Wills ... 1994.... all over Australia...

Mind you... in those days we used ISDN..... still IMO, a better implementation than broadband... pity we stuffed the old Telstra up...

But, as Tim C says... it was all over fibre optic...

Rupe, can you mirror a database across servers at two separate locations and use DNS to detirmine your location and connect you through to the most efficient one?
Like the way google determines that we use a .au and would most likely use a server/data centre here in Australia...

There is hardly any data through put on the server processors, it just needs to process a query and send you what you asked for. It just doesn't help when it gets so many 100
queries a minute. So if you could share the load out amongst multiple servers (virtual or real) then it would be great, but at the same time those servers have to use processing power and
sacrifice speed to have to talk back one separate machine containing the SQL database.

I suppose this is where mirroring really makes sense, but how much processing power is sacrificed to make sure that every mirror is kept identical to each other.

The third option is breaking up the forum to multiple servers nation or world wide. Each comes under the backyardaquaponics.com domain but have separate subdomains
which talk to separate servers. eg. general.backyardaquaponics.com, members_systems.backyardaquaponics.com. It would also reduce the size of the databases and essentially
divide the load into as many 'chunks' as needed. Pictures could be stored on images.backyardaquaponics.com and pulled from there.

So instead of sending 30 requests to www.backyardaquaponics.com it sends 5 to www.backyardaquaponics.com, 10 to general.backyardaquaponics.com, 5 from forum.backyardaquaponics.com and 5 from images.backyardaqauaponics.com for example.

and you guys are talking about load balancing and mirroring and clustering? Now if you where talking about setting up hosting for maybe somethingawful.com (8,039 registered users logged in, 69,195,160 total posts) but we are a long way from that kind of traffic.

What kind of bandwidth are we burning a month Joel?

Well my router reckons I am over 1gb per month

I know you dont like it Joel, but what about a donation button on the forum portal page?

Would it have much of a difference to the bandwidth if you didnt upload photos from the site? On other forums I have been to you have to use sites such as http://photobucket.com/
Would this clear up bandwidth issues or not make much difference?

I like the fact that the photos are stored here. If you use the other method, many of the photos end up failing to display over time because of people's photobucket etc accounts expiring.

True VB good point.

i'll wait for joel to reply, but i'm CERTAIN its not a bandwidth issue, but a CPU load issue.

Don't know about php or SQL, but considering every post is stored in a DB file that is queried every time a person views a page you can see how a large number of people logged in and viewing / posting might load up the cpu.

Part of the problem... bandwidth and CPU utilisation is probably due to the increasing loading of pictures.... hence constant disk I/O... probably queued....

Yep you can mirror/load balance the database across multiple disk arrays and/or even servers...

That's the beauty of clustering ... (yep maybe a bit exxcessive Nico ).... and they can be in seperate locations.... and will auto failover if one array/server goes down...

Couple of "blade" servers running OpenVMS would do the trick just fine.... but then you also need a "T3" type connection.... here in OZ... an "E1" ...

For a E1 your looking at $900 a month just for line rental then you would need to pay for data over that.

An E1 is the equivalent of a symetrical 2048/2048 DSL service.... but with better/unlimited download quota...

Unfortunately Teltra no longer offers ISDN... pity was rock solid... and scalable...

Bandwith isn't a problem, we used 58GB last month which I think is about 1/10 of our limit. Space we are using is about 1/10th of our limit as well, it's just the processing power that we are evidently chewing through, which is probably mainly to do with the forum database. Strange though that there are no stats that I can view about it in my backend here... Very convenient.