Web server upgrade

[TransAmDan]

Well, its that time of year, its time to renew the web server. The processor is fine, but there are some deals on performance items. Like RAM being cheaper and SSD is available, also 1GB ethernet is standard, where its currently 100mbit.

Always good to keep things fresh and up to date.

No date set for migration, just getting the fundamentals in place.

 

[TransAmDan]

E3-1230v3 Quad Core (Lin.)
RAM : 8 GB DDR3 RAM
Hard Disk : 2 x 240 GB Performance SSD
Operating System : Linux CentOS 6.x
RAID : RAID 1 ( needs 2 drives )
Control Panel : Plesk 12 Web Pro edition FREE
Bandwidth : 10000 GB
R1Soft CDP Backup
SpamExperts Spam Filter
Port Speed : Dedicated 1 Gbit Port
Hardware Firewall : No Firewall *

 

[TransAmDan]

Okey we have some progress on the new server. The server has been installed in the data center in London on a 1gbit network connection. I can talk to this new computer.

The plan is to copy over the website soon, perhaps at 11pm tonight, should be ready by morning, the DNS records need to change which could take up to 24 hours.

So during the copying, I need to make sure the website doesn't change, so I will disable it so no posts can be made during this time.

By morning, it will appear the website is still down, you may be looking at the old(current) website or the new one at this point. Eventually everyone will see the website on the new server as the DNS changed around the world pointing to the new location of the server.

Of course I will try to keep the downtime as short as possible. If I don't feel comfortable, then it wont be done tonight. There are still some things to sort on the new server before the transfer happens.

 

[AmericanThunder]

Have fun with that...

 

[TransAmDan]

Just done a speed test on the old server on 100mb/s,

Testing from EUKHOST Ltd (5.77.47.66)...
Selecting best server based on latency...
Hosted by Vorboss Limited (London) [2.52 km]: 3.933 ms
Testing download speed........................................
Download: 70.78 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed..................................................
Upload: 6.64 Mbit/s

Speed test on new server with 1000mb/s connection.
Testing from EUKHOST Ltd (5.77.63.84)...
Selecting best server based on latency...
Hosted by Vorboss Limited (London) [2.52 km]: 11.648 ms
Testing download speed........................................
Download: 633.64 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed..................................................
Upload: 264.75 Mbit/s

Wow, we should certainly see some speed differences, as its a web server serving information to us, its the Upload figure that is important. So the old(current) one being 6Mb, and new being 264Mb. so 44 times faster

 

[AmericanThunder]

Surely it's the download speed that's important most of the time?
As in downloading to the end-user?
And of course the bottleneck then will be people's own connection speed

 

[TransAmDan]

Yes downloading at the users end is the bottleneck. When you are downloading from web server it is effectively uploading to you. Well that's how I think of it, I could be wrong. Either way, download and upload speeds of the server exceeds even my internet download speed. It should manage multiple users viewing photos at the same time with ease.

 

[AmericanThunder]

Download refers towards the user from the server.
Upload refers towards the server from the user.
Agreed, it's going to make a substantial difference as it far exceeds what we pay for. Like you we could have huge speeds but don't use it these days so pulled it back to the speed of our bottleneck which is our wifi speed. It's more than enough for tablet based browsing and consumption with the occasional traffic going the other way.
Nice one Dan - thanks.

 

[an88fiero]

Yes thanks Dan - be nice to have it going speedy again

 

[TransAmDan]

Also I will revisit the CDN stuff. It is good in some ways, as its content of the website scattered around the world, and it gets served from your closest server. Its usually small things, like the buttons on the website, or stylesheets which build up the page, things that don't change often. However as most of our users are in the UK, and London is pretty central, it may be able to serve things like that quicker than CDN, who knows... Its all going to be part of the tweaking process, and various speed measurements.
I know Dave saw it hanging waiting for CDN, we certainly don't want to see things like that happen.

 

[TransAmDan]

Just gave it another speedtest, although many daily backups go on this time of day though till morning. Still lightning fast This time I got a screen grabby

 

[TransAmDan]

Website copying is scheduled for 11pm Wednesday night. So we will have a little downtime around that time, as will need to disable the forum during the copy so no further posts are made until it is live on the new server.
Of course I will keep this downtime to a minimum.

 

[TransAmDan]

Although the migration was planned for tomorrow, the server engineers have started copying it over today. Which kind of works out better, as I'm more likely to be able to do tweaks between the training courses at work, that i would be having change to tweak while travelling home.

 

[TransAmDan]

Migrations is still going on at 2:30am it was 50% complete, however it seems this progress isn't linear, its 8:30am and not quite there yet.

 

[TransAmDan]

New webserver is up and running, if you are reading this you are on the new website. So feel free to post now.
The journey was fairly painless.

 

[TransAmDan]

DNS is updating around the world, so some of us will come online at different times, even in the UK certainly areas get updated at different times.

Places that have updated, note IP addresses ending in 105 is the old one, 85 is the new
So only Brazil and LA in USA so far.

	Mountain View CA, United States Google​	5.77.47.105
	Canoga Park CA, United States Sprint	5.77.47.105
	New York NY, United States Speakeasy	5.77.47.105
	Reston VA, United States Sprint	5.77.47.105
	Los Angeles CA, United States Speakeasy	5.77.63.85
	Toronto ON, Canada Radiant	5.77.47.105
	Sao Paulo, Brazil Universo Online	5.77.63.85
	London, United Kingdom Verizon	5.77.47.105
	Paris, France Assistance Publique	5.77.47.105
	Dortmund, Germany Verizon	5.77.47.105
	Mantova, Italy TEANET	5.77.47.105
	Istanbul, Turkey Turk Telekom	5.77.47.105
	Moscow, Russia Russian Academy of Sciences	5.77.47.105
	Lahore, Pakistan WorldCALL	5.77.47.105
	Delhi, India Tikona Infinet	5.77.47.105
	Bangkok, Thailand 3BB Broadband	5.77.47.105
	Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Packet One Networks	5.77.47.105
	Nanjing, China NanJing XinFeng IT	5.77.47.105
	Broadbeach QLD, Australia AAPT	5.77.47.105
	Melbourne VIC, Australia Pacific Internet	5.77.47.105
	Auckland, New Zealand Vodafone	5.77.47.105

 

[an88fiero]

Dont know why, but when we both are at home and Dave is on the website - it takes an eternity for me to view anything

I've tried both iPad and iPhone but it takes ages :'(

 

[an88fiero]

Just posting that one message took 5 mins

 

[an88fiero]

And as Dave wasn't on - the last post took 2 secs to post lol

 

[TransAmDan]

Did it do something similar on the old server?

It would be nice to get to the bottom of this. Both your devices would be on the same IP address to the outside world but that shouldn't matter. My devices would also be the same and I don't have the issue. At the moment I don't have an answer, but could get a colleague at work to open the website on an iPad and his iPhone sharing the same internet connection to see if we can replicate the issue.