We have now ironed out much of the (inevitable) bugs that appeared in the transition. However since this was quite a major upgrade, there's bound to be some more problems lurking around in the shadows. Therefore please do let us know if you encounter something that is not working as expected.
In addition to moving to completely new server hardware, we also switched from very old and unsupported BlueDragon FREE Coldfusion server to an open source version of the same software - Open BlueDragon (or OpenBD for short).
Probably the most significant change was moving the hosting location from Dallas, Texas to Amsterdam in the Netherlands. The change in location allowed us to get much more beef behind the scenes (full server specifications after the break).
Since the majority of our users come from the North America, we also installed a dedicated cache server for our users there. The cache server is implemented using Varnish Cache - an open source web application accelerator. More precisely Varnish is a caching HTTP reverse proxy, which stores copies of our pages and, if cached, serves them quickly to the end user without going back to our actual application servers (OpenBD), shaving off precious time on each request.
Along with the implementation of the cache it is possible that not all pages are refreshed correctly. I.e. you may find that some news comments can be out of date or the front page missing a recent news item. Again, we'd be more than happy to hear of any such problems you might encounter. Please bear in mind that the pages are only cached for users that are not logged in. Logged in users also access the site through the Varnish proxy, but at least for the time being all the page requests are passed through to our backend servers.
Here are the full specifications of our current server structure:
- 3 x HP DL180G6 (database servers (MySQL 5.5))
- 2x Intel Quad-Core Xeon E5620
- 32GB
- 2x300GB SAS (RAID1, OS)
- 10x300GB SAS (RAID1+0, DB)
- 5 x HP DL120G6 (WWW backend servers)
- 1x Intel Quad-Core Xeon X3440
- 8GB
- 2x500GB SATA
- 2 x HP DL120G6 (Varnish cache servers (one in US, one in NL))
- 1x Intel Quad-Core Xeon X3440
- 8GB
- 2x500GB SATA
- 1 x HP DL180G5 (images, css and other static content + DNS)
- 2x Intel Quad-Core Xeon L5410
- 16GB
- 2x300GB SAS (RAID1, OS)
- 6+1x1TB SATA (RAID5, data)
- 5 x file download servers, 100Mbps uplink for each (for software downloads)
How do you find our site after the move? Does it feel faster or slower? Have you run into problems? Write a comment to this news article or send us feedback directly. We are looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
Written by: Jari Ketola @ 30 Sep 2011 8:57
