Well, it's done. Over. My last day at Ballistic Media (CGSociety) is now finished.

To my friends - for five years, my family - good bye. Keep in touch!

In the hardest decision in my working career to date, I've put in my notice at Ballistic Media.

My last day working for this wonderful company will come on the 25th of July.

I'm going to miss the community here - providing support and running challenges has opened my eyes to a world of awesome!

Stay in touch;
Robert.

Our hosting company has had a big fire in the datacenter hosting some of our servers. The main transformer has been taken offline, bringing the entire set of servers in that DC offline with it.

http://forums.theplanet.com/index.php?showtopic=90185

Service will be restored as soon as possible.

Thanks!

Update: I have a list of affected services here. Post there if you find something else not working.
Update: All services have been resumed successfully and everything should be A-OK...

Hi all,

You may have noticed that I haven't blogged in quite a while - about five weeks. That's because I've been busily setting up new servers for the CGSociety. Already overhauled is CGTalk, CGPortfolio, CGJobs, and a few of the smaller sites. Still underway is the CGWorkshops upgrade; later in the year our Features site will move over too.

The first big change you might notice is that there is no daily downtime. No more "lunch-time" for the servers (and one less reason for me and my co-workers to hit up Slashdot ).

We did this by doing two things - backups on the database server using LVM snapshots, rather than taking the database offline, and a "live" backup using MySQL's replication feature. Also of note on the database server is the quadrupled RAM (now 16GB), 8 cores of CPU power, and multiple 15kRPM drives.

That RAM and the fast drives have helped drive response times down - the "showthread.php" page on CGTalk, one of the most-hit pages on all of CGSociety, now responds in under 80ms on average - compared to the over 400ms average we had for most of the year to date.

We've also taken the opportunity to upgrade a bunch of the web nodes too, using modern dual-core processors and a more reliable server configuration. We're also moving to a paired system, where each machine is effectively duplicated on the next machine over - so future outages will be faster to recover from.

Future plans involve more servers, high-availability of all content (instead of just CGTalk), migration to vBulletin 3.7, and the migration of our CGS Features area - one of the oldest parts of the CGSociety ecosystem, it's got a life of its own and has to be handled with care! But we'll bring it into the 21st century so we can keep feeding you all the news you can eat.

Stay tuned for updates!

Something we've been working on for quite a while now is planning our next round of hardware upgrades. Right on the cusp of this, we've suffered a hardware outage on the database server that's pulled our performance down. What timing!

But, it'll just make the change all the more noticeable when our new database server comes online. Shiny new 15kRPM drives, 16GB of RAM... this thing makes our current DB server weep with envy.

Everything is ordered, and we're just impatiently waiting for delivery day. It shouldn't be long at all after we get it that it's up and running and pulling performance not just back to the level it was at two weeks ago, but well above it again.

We've also got no less than four new web nodes coming along for the ride - it'll make me busy for a while installing all this kit! We don't have an exact delivery date yet, so...

Just for a bit of fun, the first person who emails me after the new DB server comes online, to tell me that they can see the speed improvement, gets a one-year free CGS membership.

Just to give you some idea, it should happen in April. I'm hoping for early April

(One entry per person, employees of a bunch of companies are not allowed to enter, entries are timed by received time not sent time, etc. etc. etc.)