OK, the time has finally come... we have a new server!
I will be spending tonight and all day tomorrow transitioning to the new digs... I don't expect it to affect us until late tomorrow afternoon.
I will make give everybody a warning then take us offline for (hopefully!) 3-4 hours...
When we are done, we will have a new home with 6 TIMES the power and RAM as before... I expect to see some MAJOR upgrades in performance... once we have settled into the new server, I will start to prep us for a major upgrade to our Vbulletin software... but that may wait until the post season...
I know it's been a long time coming, but bear with me for a little longer and it will all be worth it! [Reply]
in life shit is always c hanging, change is not a bad thing. People will get used of it. I been to plenty of forums that tried to hold on to the old software and finally said fuck it, and upgraded, people got used of it, and its a non issue. [Reply]
Originally Posted by 007:
One could argue the picture forum is an incredible strain. Just sayin. :-)
Aren't the pics mostly just embedded from offsite picture hosts like imgur, etc? If so, then those are no more taxing on CP's servers than regular posts; the photos/videos are loaded from those hosting sites, not here. There are 196k posts in the picture forum and 495k in the media center forum as compared to 12m in The Lounge. If the issue is the number of database records then the pics/media forums are not the problem. [Reply]
Originally Posted by DaFace:
I can't speak to the benefits of AWS over our current setup, but characterizing it as a "shared server" at "some local ISP" isn't really accurate. It's a dedicated server with only AC's sites on it, and we're by far the biggest. (He has a few other sites for his clients I believe, plus PatriotsPlanet.) It's hosted in a server farm with well over a Tbps of bandwidth.
As I mentioned, the problem as far as I can tell is that we're running on software that was designed in like 2007. Can we change it? Sure, but it's a ton of work, and just look at how people have responded to the change at the Orange Mane. Everyone loves vBulletin 3.8 for the front-end. It's just that the back-end sucks.
PATRIOTS PLANET!!!! FUCK THOSE GUYS!!! With all that teams sucess you would think they could afford their own server. Bunch of low rent mutha fu#kers!! :-) [Reply]
Originally Posted by FlorentinePogen:
Aren't the pics mostly just embedded from offsite picture hosts like imgur, etc? If so, then those are no more taxing on CP's servers than regular posts; the photos/videos are loaded from those hosting sites, not here. There are 196k posts in the picture forum and 495k in the media center forum as compared to 12m in The Lounge. If the issue is the number of database records then the pics/media forums are not the problem.
Its really more of a facetious comment, hence the smiley. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Dante84:
That’s true. Could nuke the pr0n threads. You sick ****s could jerkoff on a million other websites but you come to CP? :-)
Only us sick fucks would admit to going to a football bulletin board to throw yogurt... [Reply]
Originally Posted by DaFace:
MariaDB 10.0.38. Most of the tables are MyISAM. I've debated messing around and seeing what would happen if I changed the POST table (which is the problem) to InnoDB, but it would likely take hours to change it and hours to change back if it still sucks. Plus, it could also royally break stuff. So I've decided I'm probably not the best one to do it. :-)
At some point, if we decide we're just going to live with this software forever, we may need to consider pruning the database down. I've mulled over something like cloning the site and DB, then putting it at a different URL as a pure archive (no new posts), then pruning the active CP site down to just threads/posts from the past 5 years or something. Constantly sorting a 13 GB table almost has to be the biggest issue. There are better ways of doing the query in newer versions of vBulletin, but the queries in this version suck donkey balls.
The one hardware upgrade that I wonder might help would be to move to a server where we could throw the entire database onto SSDs rather than HDDs. I could be wrong, but it seems like IO is probably the issue, so moving the DB onto a drive that would respond a lot faster might help. Maybe.
So for what it's worth, here are the options as I see them:
Live with what we have. Possibly try a few things that probably won't help much. The end.
Try a hardware upgrade (new server with SSDs for storage maybe). Might not really help much. Tough to say. But could work. Very time intensive for AC.
Prune the database. Some loss of functionality (couldn't bump a 15-year old thread, which can be fun sometimes). Moderate amount of time for AC.
Move to completely different software. We'd gain a lot of features in "modern" software, but we'd lose some functionality people are used to here for sure. Rep would work differently. Thumbs would work differently. Categories and prefixes would work differently. Mod options like thread bans might not work. It would almost certainly fix the lag issues, but there are plenty of sites out there that have gone under due to major functionality changes, so it's not a decision to make lightly. Would be an insane amount of work for AC and high amount of work for others like me and Bearcat to try and tweak all of the settings to make things as familiar as possible.
Moving DB to own server on SSD’s would help quite a bit. Moving to a small cluster on SSD’s more. Move to a cluster that also shards the tables across multiple instances even more so. [Reply]
Originally Posted by DaFace:
MariaDB 10.0.38. Most of the tables are MyISAM. I've debated messing around and seeing what would happen if I changed the POST table (which is the problem) to InnoDB, but it would likely take hours to change it and hours to change back if it still sucks. Plus, it could also royally break stuff. So I've decided I'm probably not the best one to do it. :-)
At some point, if we decide we're just going to live with this software forever, we may need to consider pruning the database down. I've mulled over something like cloning the site and DB, then putting it at a different URL as a pure archive (no new posts), then pruning the active CP site down to just threads/posts from the past 5 years or something. Constantly sorting a 13 GB table almost has to be the biggest issue. There are better ways of doing the query in newer versions of vBulletin, but the queries in this version suck donkey balls.
The one hardware upgrade that I wonder might help would be to move to a server where we could throw the entire database onto SSDs rather than HDDs. I could be wrong, but it seems like IO is probably the issue, so moving the DB onto a drive that would respond a lot faster might help. Maybe.
So for what it's worth, here are the options as I see them:
Live with what we have. Possibly try a few things that probably won't help much. The end.
Try a hardware upgrade (new server with SSDs for storage maybe). Might not really help much. Tough to say. But could work. Very time intensive for AC.
Prune the database. Some loss of functionality (couldn't bump a 15-year old thread, which can be fun sometimes). Moderate amount of time for AC.
Move to completely different software. We'd gain a lot of features in "modern" software, but we'd lose some functionality people are used to here for sure. Rep would work differently. Thumbs would work differently. Categories and prefixes would work differently. Mod options like thread bans might not work. It would almost certainly fix the lag issues, but there are plenty of sites out there that have gone under due to major functionality changes, so it's not a decision to make lightly. Would be an insane amount of work for AC and high amount of work for others like me and Bearcat to try and tweak all of the settings to make things as familiar as possible.
As an IT person I would do the last option because I hate keeping around super old software just because. :-) And if you were going to do that and the cost wasn't to bad I would move it to Azure or AWS.
The downside of that is probably no way to import accounts and post history outside of that there is no feature that I couldn't do without that I depend on. People would get used to it. [Reply]
Originally Posted by dirk digler:
As an IT person I would do the last option because I hate keeping around super old software just because. :-) And if you were going to do that and the cost wasn't to bad I would move it to Azure or AWS.
The downside of that is probably no way to import accounts and post history outside of that there is no feature that I couldn't do without that I depend on. People would get used to it.
Upgrading to newest VB would be seamless minus a few feature losses.
Migrating to another software such as Xenforo would be pretty much the same as they have conversion scripts. Just more time consuming. [Reply]
I'm not an IT guy, but it would seem to me that an equipment upgrade might be one of the easier fixes. I'm not sure how long that takes, but you'd have to shut the board down for a bit. Could we live without our beloved board for 6-8 hours?
One thing I have noticed is we have stuff showing up on the 1st page that are of little or no interest to most of us. Why do we need a Broncos thread? The last time I looked, there were over 35K posts. If you want to see donkey news, go to one of their sites. The same with the St. Louis Cards thread. I don't know how much effort it would take to do some pruning, but do we really need to bump a 2 year old thread, let alone one farther back?
Personally, I don't know, or care to know, what software we have. I'll adjust to whatever changes are needed on my part. Again, if we can't bump a 2 year old thread or give a thumbs up/down, I can live with that. [Reply]
