Weblog entry #197 for Steve
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I've been quiet here for a while, for a couple of different reasons.
But there have been some changes recently to the code behind the site, nothing major just incremental updates to things like the weblog feeds.
The site itself has had some stability problems, which I mostly suspect are due to a combination of bad coding, and dodgy memory - will find out shortly if the latter is the case.
Thankfully Bytemark who supply me with the host running this site, (and a job!), have agreed to give me a replacement host and that will be coming online shortly. Hopefully that will mean an end to any stability issues.
For the curious the code is currently running on a machine with:
steve@debian-administration:~$ head -n 5 /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 vendor_id : AuthenticAMD cpu family : 15 model : 44 model name : AMD Sempron(tm) Processor 2600+
In terms of memory there is:
steve@debian-administration:~$ free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 940 479 461 0 54 245
-/+ buffers/cache: 179 761
Swap: 1023 0 1023
(Memory usage climbs over time, the machine had a reboot yesterday and will slowly rise until swap begins ..)
The new machine will have a better processor and 4Gb of memory.
Migration will be nice and easy since it mostly involves checking the code out of the mercurial repository and then moving the database contents over.
Finally several people have noticed the stability issues and have offered to run mirrors - I'm enormously greatful for the offers. But currently I have no plans to take anybody up on them.
Why? Because adding a mirror is hard. We'd have to need to begin looking at MySQL replication, and similar issues. If it were possible, easily, to have a static site then I might go for that.
Static Site?
I think I'd be willing to make "static.d-a.org" which just hosted the articles, and comments, on a separate machine. Would that be useful to people?.
I could easily export articles 1-N with all comments in a simple manner and setup an hourly rsync, or similar to make sure it worked in an efficient manner. There would be no polls, no weblogs, no ability to comment, and no RSS feeds, but it would make the site "available" in the case of extended downtime.
Then again maybe people just do what I do and look in the google cache in the event of issues?
Comments welcome.
Comments on this Entry
The other thing I use is what I wittily call "the back up of the internet" - the waybackmachine - mostly for other sites though.
PJ
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If you have a static site you may be able to turn search engines off the main (dynamic) site which should also reduce the load.
--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
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Have the article pages and the home page static (dynamically generated as needed via cron or similar)
Have the comments loaded seperately via an iframe, javascript/ajax, or a link to another seperate "talkback" page.
Have the poll question static, and the dynamic-ness isn't invoked unless someone answers the poll, and put the results on a seperate page too.
This would be a major undertaking, but it could be done, and would greatly reduce server load (and likely inprove the cacheability of the site).
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