We’ve had a bit of downtime the last few days, most of which was planned, but happened at an unplanned time, so I’d just like to take a few moments and go over the recent changes.
First off, we’ve been planning to move our servers between datacenters for a few months now, but we haven’t had the time to do it. The largest motivation for the move, has been the cost of power in the first location. We’ve been paying 45c per kWh, which works out to be around $200/month just to keep our main database server running – yikes! The new datacenter costs us around $35/amp/month, which is still pricey, but close to halves our power costs. To help this out further, we replaced our 80watt processors with 50watt processors, which cut around 0.5amps of usage per server.
The next change we made was a preemptive change of OS to Fedora 15 from Fedora 14. I say preemptive, because F15 is still in beta. F15 has a few nice changes which have helped us a lot. First off, F15 includes MySQL 5.5 by default, which gives us a roughly 20% increase in query performance. This translates to an average of 20ms faster responses for our users, which might not seem like a lot, but equates to around a 30% drop in processing time on our end. F15 also includes kernel 2.6.38, which includes optimization’s for multi core systems, that help distribute load better across cores. Overall, the update has gone without a hitch.
Our last issue was a rather unexpected routing issue that seemed to go unnoticed by our ISP for most of the night. We suspect a loss of around 30% of our traffic due to this issue, and the appearance that we were down for around six hours.
So there you have it, faster servers, greener and cheaper power, and unexpected routing issues. It’s now back to making more code improvements to the site!
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