Our new home...

Welcome people to your new home

What are you talking about I hear you say? Well, we'd come to notice as of late the forum has started to crawl - a victim of our own success you might say - and something had to be done

Well, as of yesterday - we moved into our new home, a nice friendly data centre in the Big Apple - yes, we've setup shop in New York. This means the servers are only a short hop over the pond, rather than a hop over - then across the main land.

But, what's that you say? I said serverS?? Indeed so! No longer is the forum running from one server, but indeed two brand new custom built boxes now power us.

So the specs (if you remember, the old machine was a Dual Xeon 2.8 with 2 Gig of RAM)....

Both machines come in at the following:
Dual Processor Dual Core Intel Woodcrest 5130 (That's the equivilant of 4 CPU's each )
4 GIG of RAM
SATA II RAID 1 on the webserver and SCSI RAID 1 on the database server.

Combined, these should keep the forum zipping along for quite sometime to come.

There are still tweaks and updates to be made, so there may be some erratic behaviour over the next week or so - but if you notice anything else you think shuoldn't be there, please report it using the bug manager.

To 2007 ....

Ace chap, well in

"4 GIG of RAM SATA II RAID 1 on the webserver and SCSI RAID 1 on the database server." Sounds a bit too technical for me.

Your hard work is very much appreciated!

We're not worthy! we're not worthy!

That means the webserver has fast fast data transfer, and the database server isn't quite as fast but still fast, I think

Other way around

SATA II is the latest in Serial ATA hard drive technology, which is a lot faster than the old IDE drives. This means getting the images and static data loaded up is a lot quicker.

SCSI is an older (but incredibly fast and reliable) technology which allows super fast disk access times, therefore for a busy database it's ideal (and overkill for the webserver when you factor in cost issues - SCSI is expensive).

RAID 1 means that there are two identical drives in each machine, so if one hard drive dies, the other takes over automatically and transparently - ie no down time....

Nice one Ben

Definitely can feel the difference.....

You lucky people - my house has a single internet connection shared between 22 people - only now they've gone to bed can I actually see what it's like

Hi Ben, are there data protection issues with moving the information outside of the EU? Different rules apply. Feels much faster now which is good, seemed to slow down quite a bit after the last software upgrade.

Interesting question - though I don't think data protection act is valid in the US (as we are not moving data out - it was never in the UK...?)

Plus it's not personally identifying information - all we have is an email address?

Very Cool Indeed!

Yup excellent!

now all we need is a few thousand donations to to pay for it all

This really is so much faster, really great to know this forums getting so big you've had to upgrade lol! Great efforts ben

Jordan

Thanks Ben I can actually feel the difference now I have a better connection of my own as well