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!