At 8/1/06 03:26 PM, Tim wrote:

At 8/1/06 02:40 PM, Nino_JoJ wrote:

At 8/1/06 02:37 PM, Nino_JoJ wrote: guys stop spamming

I mean enough is enough !

So, am I to believe it's better to give less information? If so, that'll make my life easier.

good point!

You mentioned Searching. Does that mean you're bringing back that fabled "Word Search" or whatever it was that I never had the experience of using?

well i hope you fix all the bugs this time,so i wont have to see a other outage on newgrounds...

At 8/1/06 03:41 PM, Noob-Antichrist wrote: You mentioned Searching. Does that mean you're bringing back that fabled "Word Search" or whatever it was that I never had the experience of using?

Never heard of that ;( Are you making it up, cause if you are >:(.

XD, is it real tim?

It's good that the fileserver finally got replaced.

is the audio portal now accepting submissions again as liljim said theyd be stopping it until the new system was up? so the new systems up, that means we can upload again, right? also does this mean we will start to see the implemtation of the new ideas for the AP which have been discussed for what seems like forever? for more info visist the AF the thread should be floating about on the first page.

At 8/1/06 03:41 PM, Noob-Antichrist wrote: You mentioned Searching. Does that mean you're bringing back that fabled "Word Search" or whatever it was that I never had the experience of using?

We can't say yet just how this will impact the search features on the site, but here's basically how it works, since I think I saw a little confusion in other posts.

Right now NG has a single Database server which reads and writes data... So whenever someone votes or writes a review, that writes to the server. Whenever someone loads a Portal submission or searches, that is reading from the server.

By adding a second read-only server that is dedicated to searching, all of the searches could take place on a box that is doing nothing else - it isn't dealing with grounds gold logins, it isn't dealing with reading and posting reviews, it's just dealing with searches. We'll have a lot more power for search, so we will HOPEFULLY be able to bring back some old search features and improve the existing ones.

The other great thing is that searches are one of the more intensive processes for the database server, so if for any reason the server is under a lot of load from searches, it won't slow down the main database server, which should have a lot of capacity for user logins, accessing content pages and submitting info.

I hope I did a decent job at explaining all that... Otherwise James and Tim will scold me.

At 8/1/06 05:09 PM, TomFulp wrote:

At 8/1/06 03:41 PM, Noob-Antichrist wrote: You mentioned Searching. Does that mean you're bringing back that fabled "Word Search" or whatever it was that I never had the experience of using?

We can't say yet just how this will impact the search features on the site, but here's basically how it works, since I think I saw a little confusion in other posts.

Right now NG has a single Database server which reads and writes data... So whenever someone votes or writes a review, that writes to the server. Whenever someone loads a Portal submission or searches, that is reading from the server.

By adding a second read-only server that is dedicated to searching, all of the searches could take place on a box that is doing nothing else - it isn't dealing with grounds gold logins, it isn't dealing with reading and posting reviews, it's just dealing with searches. We'll have a lot more power for search, so we will HOPEFULLY be able to bring back some old search features and improve the existing ones.

The other great thing is that searches are one of the more intensive processes for the database server, so if for any reason the server is under a lot of load from searches, it won't slow down the main database server, which should have a lot of capacity for user logins, accessing content pages and submitting info.

I hope I did a decent job at explaining all that... Otherwise James and Tim will scold me.

Wow. Very nice. I'm hoping to have that old feature back. It was.....pricless. And, it's great that it won't slow down the main database, because i remember when i was trying to login.....1.5 hours of loading...lol. It didn't really slow down that long. It was more like 5 minutes, but my computer didn't know that....lol

So congrats on the cool new server NetApp 3020 thingy....whatever you want to call it.

At 8/1/06 05:09 PM, TomFulp wrote: stuff.

Sounds good. It would be cool if you could search stuff, then order it by date, author (A-Z), Submission(A-Z) e.t.c.
It'd cut alot of search time down :)

is the AP accepting uploads again yet? thats all i want to know.

At 8/1/06 02:47 PM, ThunderboltLegion wrote:

At 8/1/06 02:36 PM, Tim wrote: There are many great things in the newgrounds pipeline and this was only the beginning.

To what are you refering to, mabye just a hint?

Sorry, you'll have to wait and see.

At 8/1/06 02:58 PM, -Fire- wrote: Great. Does this mean we get the old header back now?

Nope. Long live the new header :)

At 8/1/06 03:03 PM, skflashv wrote: tim needs a raise

Heh, well, the more you make the more you spend, so you end up back where you started. Besides, jobs aren't always about the money...

At 8/1/06 02:41 PM, Socially-Failed wrote: So, now that we have new servers, does that also mean faster uploading and speed overall in the portals?

Hmm, perhaps. It's showing a 95% hit rate for its cache, which means everything is being served from memory (a good thing).

At 8/1/06 03:19 PM, Pilot-Doofy wrote:

At 8/1/06 02:41 PM, Socially-Failed wrote: So, now that we have new servers, does that also mean faster uploading and speed overall in the portals?

I don't think the average Joe has to worry about increased upload speeds on a server with a decent connection. When you're uploading to a server, it uses it's downloading speed to accept the file, so you'd really need to increase it's download speed.

When you download files, it uploads them. Plus, in most scenerios, the user is the one limiting the upload, since most ISPs don't pack the connection with upload rates that are very good, which I dispise.

We've got plenty of bandwidth but I'm working with Radware (our load balancing vendor) to keep the site speedy during the peak hours.

At 8/1/06 02:36 PM, Tim wrote: Trays of fibre-channel hard drives are attached to the controller as needed (in the case of the 3020, it supports up to 12 trays, each with 14 hard drives).

wow, thats a lot of drives. no matter how much traffic NG gets, its gonna take forever to fill that up.
the new search features sound good, i would like to see text search again, and if you can, remove the three character minimum and twenty character max on the search, that really makes it hard to find a specific topic. if you remove character limits on search and add more features, it could reduce overdone topics, because people would have absolutely no excuse for making a topic that has been done recently.

At 8/1/06 06:11 PM, Plakat wrote:

At 8/1/06 02:38 PM, Tim wrote:

At 8/1/06 02:37 PM, Jovatov wrote: Woohoo, new servers, always good.

Not really a server anymore, more of a storage system or an appliance.

What type of raid are we using here? You guys need to get some SATA SCSI Raid-5 Hotswap drives/drive config in thoose babys. You can unplug a broken primary drive and plug in the backup when its on and it wont do anything wrong. And it holds a lot of drives depending on the server.

Ok, while I appreciate suggestions, let me go through a brief history of our setup.

We started years ago with a single 73gb scsi hard drive holding all the data for both the site and the database. Looking back, those were scary times.

From that, we moved to a set of 4 10k scsi drives running software raid 5. Knowing that hardware raid offers improved rebuild times to the software alternative, we moved to a raid controller. Both of these solutions offered the hot-swap capability you mentioned earlier although with a failed drive or during rebuild, performance was significantly diminished.

At this point, the site was getting more and more traffic, so a new design had to be implemented. We ordered up a better server with a better raid controller and made the switch from raid-5 to raid-10. This offered similar redundancy without the performance hit when facing a failed drive. This is the setup we ran up until today.

Our current setup for web data uses fibre channel drives (better than scsi, much better than sata) in a Raid-DP configuration which allows for high performance and the ability to survive TWO failed drives. Also, it's expandable from our current 14 drives up to 168. The database server will remain on local RAID-10 sets for the time being as its performance and capacity is not an issue.

If anyone is curious, the webservers themselves run standalone ide/sata drives. Since all of the data is accessed via nfs (over the network) and the db cache is stored in a ramdisk the local hard drives are only used for the apache logs.

At 8/1/06 07:18 PM, Grandfather-Clock wrote:

At 8/1/06 02:36 PM, Tim wrote: Happy NIGERing.

-Tim

lmao wtf

DO NOT misquote me in that way.... EVER!

At 8/1/06 06:35 PM, Tim wrote:

At 8/1/06 02:41 PM, Socially-Failed wrote: So, now that we have new servers, does that also mean faster uploading and speed overall in the portals?

Hmm, perhaps. It's showing a 95% hit rate for its cache, which means everything is being served from memory (a good thing).

If 95% of all portal entries are being served from memory that thing must have a HUGE fucking cache!

Then again maybe it's not that big considering if an average portal movie is 3mb, and 95% of the portal traffic is coming from all the flash featured in the top 50, recent 50, front page, etc that's somewhere around 150 entries, or 450 MB. So that's still plenty of space left over for all the stuff that's being viewed from collection pages and misc. links and what not.

Or am I anywhere close with that estimation?

At 8/1/06 02:36 PM, Tim wrote: Sorry for the outage this morning, below is an explanation.

One of these days i will decline you alls apoligies.

hmph!

WTF is a server

Hooray. I blame the Clock Crew for destroying the last server =p

At 8/1/06 07:30 PM, Afro_Ninja wrote: Or am I anywhere close with that estimation?

No. Most of the files that are served up are small files, which make up the components of a page that a viewer might be looking at. I'm not interested in counting how many images are served (as an example), in the topic pages of the bbs... But that should give you an idea of what I'm talking about.

At 8/1/06 02:40 PM, BigScizot wrote:

At 8/1/06 02:38 PM, Tim wrote:

At 8/1/06 02:37 PM, Jovatov wrote: Woohoo, new servers, always good.

Not really a server anymore, more of a storage system or an appliance.

Like a toaster?

I Love Toaster.
I Love Lamp.

Yes Very good! Oh yeah by the way today NG wasnt working at all! The new servers would add success!

Thats nice

anything new is always good...horray!

At 8/1/06 05:09 PM, TomFulp wrote: We'll have a lot more power for search, so we will HOPEFULLY be able to bring back some old search features and improve the existing ones.

Sweet, bring back the User Search. I missed that one.

yay renovations!

Thts kool