Jari Ketola
12 Oct 2007 7:31
The day that we all (well at least many of us.. or some) have been waiting for ages has arrived -- the AfterDawn.com servers have been upgraded. Our old servers had been running at peak capacity for over six months now, and there was very little left to optimize. The new server setup that we switched over to today should dramatically improve response times across the site.
The switch may cause some oddities until DNS updates propagate to everyone. You might want to clear your browser cache and restart the browser to help speed up the change.
Along with the new servers we introduced individual timezone settings for the users. You can access the new user settings page at http://login.afterdawn.com/settings/. The timezone is set under Edit settings. Under the settings page you can also define whether or not you want to 1) subscribe to discussion threads by default and 2) use your signature in forum posts or news comments.
The server switch and timezone implementation may cause some weirdness during the transit period (e.g. forum posts showing up in wrong places).
For those interested in tech specs, here's a rough outline of our current setup:
Database backends: 2* Dell PowerEdge 1900 Dual Intel Xeon 5130, 8GB RAM, SAS RAID 10 array
Web backends:4* Dell PowerEdge 840 Conroe 3040, 1GB RAM, SATA
Statistics and static data:1* Dell PowerEdge 840 Conroe 3060, 4GB RAM, SATA discs
Advertisements:1* Dell PowerEdge 840 Conroe 3060, 4GB RAM, SATA RAID-1
Load balancing:Foundry ServerIron XL
Download servers:6* various configurations with various specifications
Off-site backup, development and versioning server
If you encounter any problems with the new servers please let me know by posting to this thread.
--AfterDawn.com staff