Asylum Feedback/Support

Posted by Rod M (W) on November 07, 2003 at 07:25:13

In Reply to: connection refused, and also having to click twice on links posted by ffrr on November 06, 2003 at 21:34:55:

It's a combination of factors. The first is traffic. We've had a major increase over the last month or so. Average traffic has increased from around 600K page views per day to consistently over 800K pages with 18,000 unique users and 9GB of data transferred per day. The increased load has taxed both the servers and the connection.

Secondly, I've been doing quite a number of changes to improve the efficiency. The db was upgraded and optimized, loads have been balanced somewhat between servers and some new summary tables were created. Unfortunately, building some of these improvements puts an additional load on the servers and has affected performance while the jobs were running resulting in periodic connection problems.

The db has also grown a lot as we have nearly 2 million messages, so we're due for an upgrade to a much faster server which will surely help, but is also expensive. In the meantime, the new summary tables are smaller and should result in better performance.

eThreads is a good example. It was quite slow. Now, it uses a much smaller summary table that is somewhat dedicated, so you should see an improvement. The Classic view is cached as html, so it does tend to be faster. eThreads is completely data driven, so performance varies on the speed of the db server and size of the tables.

In any case, all of the changes are now in place, so the additional load of creating and loading new tables is over. We'll be monitoring performance to ensure that we've improved it and it should be better. However, if the connection problems relate to bandwidth issues, then we have another expensive problem that would require a colo server or additional T1 to address.