New Features and Changes

It's working now... that's all that matters... time to move on to the next problem to solve or tweak to discover.

kemical said:

Sounds good! Have you used an onboard chip or used a drop in card for the RAID controller?

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Neither. Windows Server 2008 R2 is handling it via software RAID. This is better than nothing. The partitions were also sized down since not that much HD space is being used. Therefore there is less overhead. A speed improvement did result. I have used 2 drop-in cards in the past on the PCI-E1 16x for RAID on this server in the past, but it never once worked properly or was stable. The problem is that many RAID PCI cards are sold claiming genuine hardware RAID, when in fact they are just emulating software RAID using a BIOS type-preboot menu. The Windows server software RAID is the best this board will produce, and seems to be stable. If any problems arise with the configuration there is always a backup drive on standby and physical backups being made on a regular basis. At one point there were two drives with 213 backups (one full backup being made every 4 hours), but I found this to be slowing down the server and quite unnecessary. Assuredly the site is running a bit faster now and I expect less problems in the future. If traffic goes beyond what can be supported locally, I will look into moving an image of the entire machine onto the Amazon elastic cloud, which would be very exciting.

The trouble with RAID is when it works, it's great, but when it doesn't it can be a real pain is the ass but it sounds like you've got things covered RAID wise. Those drop in cards can be very expensive and like you say, not always guaranteed stability. I've never tried the way you've configured it, I'll have to do some reading up.

Great work, Thanks Bud.

Where did this site go?

Every day this site is down all day... what's up with that? This is prime time. Time to bring the "A" game.

tblount said:

Every day this site is down all day... what's up with that? This is prime time. Time to bring the "A" game.

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Mike probably working on the server computer keeping it maintained & updated, serviced.

Believe he added a few new things.

You will notice many features are disabled. All of a sudden the quirks that could effect the site's performance are being amplified by the traffic. I am indeed working on it and apologize. The traffic has spiked majorly, so some features are disabled. Particularly the Facebook Connect may be segfaulting the server. I am keeping a close eye and parsing through thousands of log entries to see what the problem is. Please have patience, we are getting hit hard with lots of visitors. The forum comes first and all the extra features second, so some are now disabled until further notice.

Mike said:

You will notice many features are disabled. All of a sudden the quirks that could effect the site's performance are being amplified by the traffic. I am indeed working on it and apologize. The traffic has spiked majorly, so some features are disabled. Particularly the Facebook Connect may be segfaulting the server. I am keeping a close eye and parsing through thousands of log entries to see what the problem is. Please have patience, we are getting hit hard with lots of visitors. The forum comes first and all the extra features second, so some are now disabled until further notice.

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We appreciate your work. Wish we could help. Can you spread the hits to other servers? You know this site is hot because most problems you search for from Google point here for solutions. Microsoft should be paying you and hosting this forum.

I just created a thread a couple minutes ago and it says I have 0 posts. Plus, it's not showing up.

rbridgeman1 said:

I just created a thread a couple minutes ago and it says I have 0 posts. Plus, it's not showing up.

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Usually takes a few minutes to show unless you check the exact location you posted. If you just check "New Post" above ... it may take a couple hours to show up there.

Also, notice the last time you logged on... probably says 2 or 3 days ago.. although you are on now ... reading this.

Ok, that's really weird. Since I couldn't sign in due to the Facebook Sign In earlier wasn't available, I created a new profile called "rbridgeman1" and posted that message above. Now, since the Facebook Sign In is available and I'm logged in using my original account, it seems it renamed the user 'rbridgeman1' to 'rbridgeman'. I was also not on this site for the past twenty minutes or so, when you say I was logged in viewing that page. And, now I can see my thread under 'rbridgeman' (my original account). Now that's confusing.

Work was performed on-site today on the lines going into the office, which were apparently damaged. Signal level has increased as a result and the likelyhood for another meltdown decreases.

Mike said:

Neither. Windows Server 2008 R2 is handling it via software RAID. This is better than nothing. The partitions were also sized down since not that much HD space is being used. Therefore there is less overhead. A speed improvement did result. I have used 2 drop-in cards in the past on the PCI-E1 16x for RAID on this server in the past, but it never once worked properly or was stable. The problem is that many RAID PCI cards are sold claiming genuine hardware RAID, when in fact they are just emulating software RAID using a BIOS type-preboot menu. The Windows server software RAID is the best this board will produce, and seems to be stable. If any problems arise with the configuration there is always a backup drive on standby and physical backups being made on a regular basis. At one point there were two drives with 213 backups (one full backup being made every 4 hours), but I found this to be slowing down the server and quite unnecessary. Assuredly the site is running a bit faster now and I expect less problems in the future. If traffic goes beyond what can be supported locally, I will look into moving an image of the entire machine onto the Amazon elastic cloud, which would be very exciting.

Click to expand...

Great, means you can have RAID even if your motherboard does not have RAID-controller.


Fun With Software RAID on Windows Server 2008 | Bauer-Power- Information is Power!

I've gotten a message a few times over the past few days while trying to access this site about not being able to access site because of some compression not supported.

Sam

The web server has simply been overloaded along with the database. Changes have been made to prevent this now. Thanks for your patience. If problems continue, even more changes will be made - in the form of looking at a different hosting routine. However, it is not really the traffic, but the resource usage which has spiked by over 100% in the last couple days. The physical connections coming into the building were corroded and replaced, giving better signal strength to the 100MBit/s line. We are nowhere near that level of traffc up or down. It is more an issue of apache and mysql staying sane or restarting now that the connection problem has been repaired.

This has been worked on tonight. It is not a memory issue - it is just a fine tuning to require a massive amount of traffic that is unanticipated. Thanks for your patience and the messages of appreciation. I am setting up an alert system to contact me immediately and someone else who has physical access to the system in the event there is a failure. Since I can't be at the system 24/7 this is a problem, but the traffic spike has been massive.

If it continues to be a problem, there are many alternatives, including upgrading to even better hardware or using multiple servers to balance the load. It is not as severe as it sounds and requires configuration tinkering.

Update: To give a good example of what has been changed, a hard limit has been placed for over 500,000 concurrent connections, for which there is enough memory to support but was unanticipated in the past. Persistant connections has also been activated on the database back-end, which was never needed before. This should smooth things over and keep the site stable and active.

The alert service is activated and there will now be immediate notification if the site is down. I will be working on refining this service late into the night.

Mike said:

The alert service is activated and there will now be immediate notification if the site is down. I will be working on refining this service late into the night.

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I hope you are getting paid for all these efforts.

I am only paid if someone buys Registry Booster or signs up as a Premium Supporter. *makes pot of coffee*

Appreciate the hard work Mike. Thanks for all.

You're all very welcome. Thanks for making the site the great place it is. It really is a great community and is helping a lot of people who are just making the transition to this great OS. I'm on the side of the fence that its my job to keep this thing running and I do appreciate your support