Server Move Oct 21st!

[fishfreek]

For the last few years AA has grown and we have remained on the same server for the entire time. While we still have room to grow on the current server we will be moving to a newer server this weekend. The move will give us better speed and slightly lower operating costs. Remember we pay for this site out of our own pocket if donations and sponsorships dont end up covering the monthly and yearly expenses.

The move will take a few hours due to the size of our database and our website itself. During this time the site will be offline to viewing, posting and replying to messages.

 

[Fishyfanatic]

Do you have an estimated start time?

 

[Fluff]

Thanks for the heads up!

 

[fishfreek]

Do you have an estimated start time?

Yep. When ever my daughter goes to bed. Dont worry you will know when it happens. It will be like security escorting you out of the store when its time to close.

 

[Fishyfanatic]

Thanks for the clarification. I'll be sure to have all items paid for and in the bag.

 

[An t-iasg]

Good luck with the move! Since I can't be on the forum then, I'll use that day to set up a new tank!

 

[justrelax]

Will there be an AA emergency withdrawl hotline? lol
-good luck!

 

[fishfreek]

Ok the move is now complete.

ALL PROBLEMS SHOULD BE REPORTED TO THE SITE HELP/FEEDBACK FORUM.

Only report problems that relate to things that worked prior to tonights move and now do not work. Items will be corrected as we have time.

 

[sudz]

for the geek in some of us... what are the stats of the new server?

 

[fishfreek]

Sure. Nothing to extravagant sine the site does not generate a huge amount of monthly income to support its operations. This is what we moved from and what we moved to. This move was a consolidation of some sorts moving our other networked websites and the hosting we do from a seperate server into a single box. Lower total monthly costs.

Our old system was a

AMD Athlon(TM) XP 2600+ (Single CPU)
2GB Ram PC2700 DDR
2 80GB Hard drives
10MB Network connection

Our new system

Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 3.00GHz (Dual CPU)
2GB Ram PC4200 DDR2
2 160GB Hard drives
10MB Network connection

Just some general site stats to be aware of that caused the move to take 3 1/2 hours.

4GB of web content (pages, images, etc)
800mb of database content (postings, private messages, etc)

All of this had to be backed up once we closed the forum on the old server and then split into 1gb chunks. THe version of FTP that we use on the server does not like files over 2gb so moving the entire backup in 1 chunk is not possible. Once all chunks where moved via server to server FTP they had to be recombined and then uncompressed. The move caused the database names to change so we had to change all the pointers to the DBs in the scripts.

 

[reefrunner69]

I can tell a difference, I used to have to wait for the server to respond, once my computer connected with the old server it was fast, but it would take 20-30 seconds (sometimes more) for the old server to respond, now it responds almost immediately.

 

[Serge]

Works beautifully for me on first access. Perhaps a tip for people still having issues, would be to suggest that they clear their browser's cache, and also, from the windows prompt run the following command:

ipconfig /flushdns

<Press enter>

Cheeers and keep up the good work!!

=

 

[fishfreek]

Serge, you seem to have more intelegance than the person whom sent me this 'know it all response' to an email I sent.

First I sent the following email this morning. The system is still trying to send to everyone as you would expect with 10K+ recipents. Most on yahoo and hotmail that throttle delivery anyway.

"We have sucessfuly moved servers. If you still see that the site is closed when you visit your still hitting the old system. Close yoru browser and try to visit the site again after opening the browser again. If that does not help restart your computer or if you have a home router between you and the internet reset the router.

The issue is your system has cached the IP address of the domain and it has not gotten the new IP thats assocated with the site yet."

Now what I got from a very knowledgeable person back.


"Actually, local computers have nothing to do with that... it's all DNS ...
why would I reset my computer or router?
that's just stupid ...

no offense of course.."

And my response

"On the contrary your PC will store DNS information for sites it has been to in a cache so it does not have to do a DNS lookup for every single page request. This increases performance. You can unselect this as an option on most browsers. You can also have it clear this cache when you close the browser out. I am very fimular with networking so I was not just talking out my tail pipe when I sent that message. In addition I have experenced it myself where my PC sees a new IP being assocated with a website yet when the website is visited from the computer you get the old website. A reboot will sometimes fix this if your not attached ot a home router but the home router could itself being doing osme cacheing of DNS information and would then direct the web request to the old IP regardless what a ping might come back with.

I saw this happening first hand last night and a reset of my local router got my browser hitting the new IP. So one only has to reset things IF they are cacheing DNS information for the short term. Over the long term (24 hours or more) the cached information will expire and the caching system will request new information about the site and its IP resolution but if you wish to resolve to a new IP before the existing cache times out you must clear the cache so the system requests new information right away."

Now I dont admit to know everything like this person seems to think they do but I do know about caching of DNS. My gosh if a DNS request was made for every single request to a webserver compaines would need HUGE clusters of servers simply supporting DNS where as reality is that the DNS servers are usually the oldest and least equiped systems as compared to application and database servers in general.

My inital email was an attempt at dumbing down the caching. I will try to remember the /flushdns command as that will be helpful for me in the future.

 

[fishfreek]

Sorry about the short outage just a bit ago. I was trying to do some final moving of large files that I probably should not have done all at once. So now I am moving them individually.