alierak: (Default)
alierak ([personal profile] alierak) wrote in [site community profile] dw_maintenance2011-07-30 03:00 pm

Load issues / site search

As [staff profile] denise mentioned yesterday, we've had various ideas about what to do about the site slowdowns. At this point I think it boils down to needing to buy more servers to keep up with all of you, but I am going to try one more thing before we do that -- temporarily disabling site search (or maybe just search indexing, so you might get old search results) so we can use the search server to handle more ordinary webpage requests. If that works, I'll be certain that more webservers are needed.

I believe I've got the memory shortage under control; by removing some unnecessary software from the servers, and forcing the webservers to restart processes more often, we've been able to handle about 50% more simultaneous requests. Meanwhile [personal profile] fu is continuing to look for the cause of the memory leaks, so that we can (1) improve code quality, because no one likes memory leaks, and (2) allow webserver processes to run longer so they are more efficient.

That said, there's another problem that showed up after tuning the webservers: our loadbalancer freaks out whenever all the webservers are busy and it has to queue up requests, and the overall throughput goes down. I see that as possibly being a bug in Perlbal; [staff profile] mark and I will look into it as soon as we can. I am guessing that if we had more webservers, we'd be less likely to run into this problem.

Thanks for your patience, and for all the kind words on [staff profile] denise's post.
ninetydegrees: Art & Text: heart with aroace colors, "you are loved" (dreamer)

Re: Newbee question

[personal profile] ninetydegrees 2011-07-31 12:22 am (UTC)(link)
Wow! Denise was fast! But, still, welcome to Dreamwidth! :)
Edited (Super Comet Denise!) 2011-07-31 00:23 (UTC)
creature_girl08: Tennyson, my third guide dog and Mary Beth (Default)

Re: Newbee question

[personal profile] creature_girl08 2011-07-31 01:34 am (UTC)(link)
Just in case my e-mail response does not work.

Thank you for pointing me out to that community and I just went and joined it. I knew there must be a place for such things.

I am finding folks here very friendly and helpful both.

BTW, problem fixed. Makes me a happy camper.

Take care,
ninetydegrees: Art & Text: heart with aroace colors, "you are loved" (flowers)

Re: Newbee question

[personal profile] ninetydegrees 2011-07-31 01:41 am (UTC)(link)
I'm glad you fixed it. It's the little things which make all the difference, right? *g*
creature_girl08: Tennyson, my third guide dog and Mary Beth (Default)

Re: Newbee question

[personal profile] creature_girl08 2011-07-31 01:49 am (UTC)(link)
Hehehehehehe! That is for sure. When I want things to look a particular way I will go to no ends to make sure it ends up as desired. Such a perfectionist.