Friday, February 28, 2014

Incoming! Rapid server reconfiguration underway ...

RationalWiki just got sued by Kent Hovind. The lawsuit is a comedy classic and will brighten your Friday afternoon. (Saloon Bar discussion.)

We're not worried about the suit — the worry is that we're about to get a zillion well-wishers hammering the server. Trent is frantically rejigging our setup as we write this, pressing a spare box into service. More news as it comes, and if the site entirely vanishes please try again five minutes later ...

Update, next day: We quickly spun up a 4GB Linode to just put Apache on (MediaWiki scales horizontally really well). It appears that Apache was taking lots of CPU, not MySQL! So we've split Apache for the main site between the two boxes (the old 8GB and the new 4GB) and the setup is ticking along nicely. Trent may have some nice graphs later.

5 comments:

  1. If your piece of damp string dies out then that would limit the load effectively.

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  2. Whoowee! It's still a bit slow & the PDF of Hovind's thing seems to 404 for most folk.(Me included)

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  3. The PDF didn't 404 for me just now. I think it got lost in the server shuffle.

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  4. (technical detail: we very quickly spun up the second box with a copy of the whole MediaWiki file tree. This is a bodge, so Trent just went back and set up the new server to mount the file tree off the old server via NFS.)

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  5. "RationalWiki is currently up" no it isn't. April 12 2014.

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