Improving Performance Levels: Server Upgrades

Migration in-process as of Thursday, August 30, 2007
Updated on August 30, 2007, 8:35 AM...

• We have added our website DNS entries into the new server and are waiting for the changes to propagate.
  
• We will cutover to the new servers once we are sure the propagation is complete.

Migration scheduled for Thursday, August 30, 2007
Updated on August 27, 2007, 9:00 PM...

• We will be cutting over to the new servers on or before the afternoon of Thursday, August 30, 2007.
• I apologize that the system has been slow and inaccessible lately, but the upgrade will include a number of technical enhancements to bring performance levels back up.
  
• Thanks for your patience!

Improving Performance Levels: Server Upgrades
Originally Posted on August 20, 2007, 6:19 PM...

It's been a busy couple of weeks for BlogPatrol. Last week, we made some major usability enhancements to the signup process to make it easier for new users to signup and install BlogPatrol onto their blogs.

BlogPatrol continues to grow steadily in the new configuration that we launched on May 19. We've reached a point, however, where our current servers are no longer giving the desired levels of service to our users:

• the web server is becoming unreliable and slow with processing http requests
• it is taking too long for the database to generate your stats reports

To help bring our system performance back to desired levels, we are upgrading our servers by moving from Woodcrest to Clovertown machines. A snapshot of the old and the new:

• Old: 2.0 GHz Dual Processor Dual Core Xeon 5130 (Woodcrest) with four cores per machine
• New: 1.86GHz Dual Processor Quad Core Xeon 5320 (Clovertown) for eight cores per machine for faster overall performance
  

• Old: 4 gigabytes of RAM per machine
  
• New: 6 gigabytes of RAM per machine
  

• Old: 32-bit CentOS operating system
• New: 64-bit CentOS operating system for faster overall performance

• Old: 10K rpm SAS hard disks
• New: 15k rpm SCSI hard disks for faster database reads/writes

We procured the new servers over the weekend of August 18-19, and we are setting up the new machines this week. I'll post an update once we are about to cutover to the new machines.