Huge server performance improvements

Huge server performance improvements

michal frackowiak 1171745991|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

In the last few days huge changes have been done to improve server performance at Wikidot.com. In fact I had to turn off searching a few days ago in order to save the database performance.

Improvements have been introduced on a few levels, from the PHP application itself (more caching) to the database structure. Results? Even under high stress during high traffic hours the server uses only ~3-5% of its cpu/disk resources. It seems that there is a lot of spare power now ;-)

To apply the changes the server had to be taken down for 28 minutes. It was the first downtime that long caused by maintenance since the Wikidot launched. So far the server has been working non-stop without a single reboot for the last 6 months.

Many thanks to developers of Memcached, PostgreSQL and many others for high-quality professional open source software!

last edited on 1171750242|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover by michal frackowiak + show more

Things seem to be screwed

taricorp 1171753225|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

It seems to me that this update screwed up something, because I was creating and editing pages fine this morning, but now trying to preview or save a new page throws an error (javascript alert()) with no message.
10 minutes later update: it seems to be working now

last edited on 1171753434|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover by taricorp + show more

Re: Huge server performance improvements

namzezam 1171762937|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

Thanks for the effort. I was worrying from performances issues, and am happy to know these news. Please take my full appreciation and thanks again for what this farm provide and provided already. I hope we can pay it back. btw, very small thing, why not having with "show comments" also number (of the comments) in the module Comments. I say it here as part of trying to make the sites more friendly to common users (eventually for gaining some money), it is part of making this wiki also appear as blog at the first look.
anyway good time good luck and thanks

Re: Huge server performance improvements

michal frackowiak 1171801167|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover

@taricorp: there is a problem with current server config I can not trace: sometimes Apache instance segfaults without throwing any error. No software upgrade fixed this. As a result you get an empty javascript error (alert) box because server sends no response (0 bytes). I will try to make some upgrades next week so (hopefully) this will be fixed. You just have to try again with saving. The problem sometimes appears with very long pages.

@namzezam: there will be separate blogging modules in the future. But indeed a total number of comments will be nice. I will add it today or tomorrow.

cheers
michal