90,000th Post! Options

[Imhotep]

This is MM's 90,000th post

Guess I'll use it to let y'all know that the system monitoring tools have alerted me that one of the fans on the server's motherboard has failed and so needs to be replaced. Unfortunately, the motherboard we've now been running on since (as far as I can remember) late 04 early 05 is no longer made, and the new fans don't have the same size (won't clip on to this motherboard), and the only fans out there that will fit are refurbished (refurbished fans, that have the same bad service history of failing...) Luckily the computer right now is down in a cool area so the fan isn't really needed, but as we know, things running hotter than they should for longer than they should eventually do fail. I don't see it as being something that will fail in the next week or so but if it does I do have a temporary system I can use to bring things back up. So, for the time being I've set up an automated image program which copies the entire system to a backup every 12 hours (12:30 AM and 12:30 PM) so if the server does go offline the most data that could be lost is 12 hours worth.

On the bright side though, figuring it's a good excuse for building a new box and retiring this 5 year old one, I'm going to be building a new server over the next week or so (depending on how long it takes all the parts to show up). It's going to be a proper industrial-class server (rather than the retired desktop computer we had been using) with 8gigs of RAM, two CPUs, and two 300GB hard drives (set up as a RAID mirror again). If anyone's interested I'll post pictures of the assembly process. Once I've finished building and burning it in I'll set up a window to move the websites and databases over to the new box. Shouldn't take more than an hour at that point.

Take care!
I

[Imhotep]

OK, done a little tweaking. Just to show the not-fully-finished raw data, here's a before and after;

before:
Benchmarking forums.mosaicmusings.net (be patient).....done


Server Software: Apache/2.2.10
Server Hostname: forums.mosaicmusings.net
Server Port: 80

Document Path: /index.php
Document Length: 123194 bytes

Concurrency Level: 10
Time taken for tests: 31.429 seconds
Complete requests: 10
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 1235810 bytes
HTML transferred: 1231940 bytes
Requests per second: 0.32 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 31428.526 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 3142.853 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 38.40 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 1 3 1.4 3 5
Processing: 31226 31367 69.2 31414 31424
Waiting: 6147 6325 90.3 6377 6412
Total: 31227 31370 69.9 31418 31427

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 31418
66% 31419
75% 31422
80% 31427
90% 31427
95% 31427
98% 31427
99% 31427
100% 31427 (longest request)
[pclark@c3po ~]$

after:
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 655654 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking forums.mosaicmusings.net (be patient).....done


Server Software: Apache/2.2.10
Server Hostname: forums.mosaicmusings.net
Server Port: 80

Document Path: /index.php
Document Length: 123620 bytes

Concurrency Level: 10
Time taken for tests: 2.252 seconds
Complete requests: 10
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 1240070 bytes
HTML transferred: 1236200 bytes
Requests per second: 4.44 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 2251.860 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 225.186 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 537.78 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 2 0.9 2 3
Processing: 2200 2225 23.2 2243 2249
Waiting: 202 223 20.9 240 246
Total: 2203 2226 23.8 2245 2252

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 2245
66% 2248
75% 2249
80% 2251
90% 2252
95% 2252
98% 2252
99% 2252
100% 2252 (longest request)
[pclark@c3po ~]$


So. What does it mean? From what I can see, taking the numbers from before and comparing them to after, this new server appears (without even getting to full optimization) to be running about 14x faster than the old. Hopefully it'll translate to a better experience for all with less time to load the pages.