SDS Posted December 30, 2014 Author Posted December 30, 2014 16 is probably good. 24 would be better, if it were available. 32 is a waste of money. If it were the Microsoft stack, 32 would probably be the minimum. I don't know that the difference between 667 and 1333 is going to be meaningful enough - I've never seen a meaningful difference in applications, at least. I think it's more important is matching the memory speed to the processor - the memory can't provide data to the Xeon 2620 faster than the chip will accept it, and the processor can only process what the memory provides. I don't know what the Xeon 2620 calls for, though. That's just a question of cost and efficiency, though - no need to spend money on performance you can't use. It ultimately shouldn't affect board performance, because your bottleneck is still database I/O. a key point here is the amount of updates I need to do. Given all the work it will take to reconfigure things - I'm going to take the opportunity to grab more hardware resources for hopefully marginal dollars, even if it sits there idle. I guess I should just call and see what a straight RAM upgrade would cost, but I'm guessing it still makes sense to get new hardware. So, I can do smaller RAM increments on current server. I can get up to 20 GB for an extra $72, but with that extra cash, I could get an entirely better server all the way around I think.
thebug Posted December 30, 2014 Posted December 30, 2014 (edited) I certainly understand that. I/O's are going to be your bottle neck. I guess i would say go as big as you can afford then. The other option is, while i enjoy this board as a free discussion board, i'm not apposed to paying a reasonable membership fee. It would help offset some or all of your costs. As i said, i enjoy this site, but one person should not have to be the sole bearer of the cost to support the site if it's costing even half of 7200 bucks. Fwiw BigPappy I like the way you think. Go big and get the members to pay for it. 400 members pay $20.00/year (or 800 pay $10.00 or however the numbers work?) Might stop trolls from signing up as well? Edited December 30, 2014 by thebug
Rockinon Posted December 30, 2014 Posted December 30, 2014 (edited) So, I'm getting serious about getting a new rig. Unfortunately, I have the personality that renders buying socks a serious task as I look to maximize every aspect of the purchase. Ugh. Currently, we have: dual Xeon 5345 2.3 GHz quadcores 12 GB of 667 RAM dual 147GB 15k SCSI drives (Raid 1) I'm looking at: Dual Processor Hex Core Xeon 2620 - 2.00GHz (Sandy Bridge) - 2 x 15MB cache 16 GB Registered DDR3 1333 RAM 200GB SSD drive Now, the last part is significant and maybe someone can help me determine what we really want. I'm currently paying for 2 SCSI drives and a raid controller, with the idea if one disk crashes the other one steps up to the plate. I'm not sure that is what I really want. What I really want (I think) is: A full disk backup that can run the server (even if at a reduced performance) with limited (not necessarily zero) data loss. With the point being the server doesn't need to be fully reconfigured again if the hardware fails and we are up and limping along with limited down time. I THINK I'm fine with losing a day of data. If so, that lops $100 off per month and puts me in the same ballpark as the current server. Does anyone with server knowledge want to chime in here? I could use some help with determining storage architecture too. Comedians - please find another thread - I need a productive conversation here before the world of youth soccer sucks me back in. Lastly, server is currently in Dallas. Have option for Wash DC. Thinking that might be better for Buffalo based peeps. SDS, are you using a dedicated, semidedicated or virtual private server? The reason I ask is because I run a hosting service. You can put the site on a dedicated server in Chicago. What you get is: 2x Opteron 4170 HE 2.1 GHz (12 cores) Processor 16 GB DDR3 RAM 4 X 500 GB SATA2 HDD 12000 GB Traffic or Opteron 4170 HE 2.1 GHz (6 cores) Processor 8 GB DDR3 RAM 2 X 500 GB SATA2 HDD 11000 GB Traffic or Intel Atom D525 1.8 GHz (2 cores) Processor 4 GB DDR3 RAM 2 X 250 GB SATA2 HDD 10000 GB Traffic Prices vary and I can create a custom package to give you exactly what you want as well. I also have semi dedicated servers and virtual servers that could be an option as well. If you want to talk about it just PM me. BTW, I have my prices set so I make 20$/month on all of my packages, but since I spend so much time on TSW, I could set something up that would likely get you more for your money. Edited December 30, 2014 by Rockinon
run dat back Posted December 31, 2014 Posted December 31, 2014 increase it more in January when the Bills make it to the Superbowl, Skynet will have taken over by then, so server capacity will be the least of our worries.
Rockinon Posted December 31, 2014 Posted December 31, 2014 (edited) MySQL. On game days, it is I/O. Too many people accessing the same exact content (usually a single game day thread). I have to turn off a topic marking feature because of the high amount of writes that locks everything up. The problem with cloud computing is you are sharing resources(memory, cpu) with others. You can choose a guaranteed amount of bandwidth but reliability could take a hit. What about semidedicated? Going this route gives you guaranteed memory and processor percentage. You get raw processing power plus a lower price. The price is lower because it is still shared but it is only shared with one or 2 others. Dedicated is nice, but you can go with a 24core server with lots of memory on a semidedicated machine(more than enough to run forum). From what you describe, I suspect your issues occur during games when people are furiously typing away. Not a lot you can do about it but throw raw processing power at it(In some cases you can go with SSD hard drives too). The good news is this route is a lot less expensive than a fully dedicated server. Edited December 31, 2014 by Rockinon
sullim4 Posted December 31, 2014 Posted December 31, 2014 I work for that big company in Redmond, on the server side of things, though not directly in datacenter ops (I'm a software engineer for one of the O365 services). I would highly recommend looking into a VM running on AWS or Azure. I know you said that you don't feel capable of spec'ing a VM, but the great thing about a VM is that you can add and scale back resources like RAM, processor cores, etc on the fly. Backups, disaster recovery, etc are all typically taken care of for you. I can only speak to Azure since that's what I'm most familiar with, but you can run mySQL, UNIX, etc... you're not tied to Windows or SQL Server. And I can say from personal experience - you will have 24x7 support from the actual Azure or AWS product team, not just a generic support team.
Rockinon Posted December 31, 2014 Posted December 31, 2014 (edited) I work for that big company in Redmond, on the server side of things, though not directly in datacenter ops (I'm a software engineer for one of the O365 services). I would highly recommend looking into a VM running on AWS or Azure. I know you said that you don't feel capable of spec'ing a VM, but the great thing about a VM is that you can add and scale back resources like RAM, processor cores, etc on the fly. Backups, disaster recovery, etc are all typically taken care of for you. I can only speak to Azure since that's what I'm most familiar with, but you can run mySQL, UNIX, etc... you're not tied to Windows or SQL Server. And I can say from personal experience - you will have 24x7 support from the actual Azure or AWS product team, not just a generic support team. A VM is still going to share memory and processor resources. I know that you can set a guaranteed percentage, but when traffic is high on this site, there are some issues. The nice thing about VM is that you are isolated from the others using the same physical machine. The problem is how many virtual servers are on the same physical machine? And how powerful is this server? You take that raw power and divide it by the number of virtual servers. Going semidedicated provides a much larger percentage of the processor and memory while saving money. Fully dedicated is best but also the most expensive. Edited December 31, 2014 by Rockinon
jr1 Posted December 31, 2014 Posted December 31, 2014 just delete all the categories except The Stadium Wall
Greg F Posted December 31, 2014 Posted December 31, 2014 Time limited but I thought I would share a few thoughts. October: I stay under 5Mbps total all year. Get game day spikes of 4.5Mbps. That is not a lot at all. Are you sure your provider isn't limiting your bandwidth? Is there a GUI interface with a web browser on your server? If there is you need to do a speed test to determine what your actual bandwidth is. One option is speedtest.net. Is the RAID controller hardware RAID or software RAID (commonly called fakerraid)? I would be 95% certain the bottle neck is either your Internet connection speed or your storage. RAID 1 is mirrored disks which means writes take twice as long (compared to a single disk) since you have to write to 2 disks. RAID 1 is not appropriate for a database. RAID 10 is the preferred configuration for databases as the write speed is considerably faster (provided you have a hardware raid card, not fakerraid). RAID 10 also is protected from a single disk failure (and sometimes 2 depending on which drives fail). RAID 10 requires at least 4 disks. Do not even consider SSD's. Most of them are not certified for use in a RAID configuration and the enterprise SSD drive prices would shock you. One more thing, RAID is not a backup plan. All that said, the first thing I would investigate is one of the web hosting companies since you are basically hosting a web site. The first year is usually dirt cheap. This site is not a significant challenge for any of the web hosting companies for either bandwidth or storage. The concerns of your server being a virtual machine are unfounded as far as I am concerned. The stupid commercial about some video going viral and slowing your web site to a crawl is marketing fear mongering. The server farms used by web hosting companies don't put your server (guest) on one hardware server (host) and just leave it there. They load balance the work load on the physical servers by constantly migrating the guest servers. When Johnny’s hamster video goes viral guess what ... you will never even know it. One more thing to consider. This sites busiest time is game day. What do you think are the busiest days for most corporate web sites? I am willing to be it isn't Sunday. My advice, which may not be worth a lot, is to first determine where the weakness is in the present setup. Shotgun approaches to fixing things are usually not very efficient financial wise. Second, get off the rented server. At $180 per month for 48 GB of RAM you will have paid for the ram in a few months. Running an Internet site on a single hardware server is well past its expiration date. I wouldn’t even consider hosting a web site on a single server and I am a system admin.
keepthefaith Posted December 31, 2014 Posted December 31, 2014 I'm in the technology biz. Have over 1000 servers and a wide variety of them sitting in a warehouse right now. All Dell, HP or IBM. Also have techs that can spec out what you need and why. Can provide a donation-like price for this and also examine your lease/rental deal. It probably sucks based on the cost numbers posted. For example, my cost on 48GB DDR3 server RAM is about $250. SDS, look under the covers and contact me if you like.
todd Posted December 31, 2014 Posted December 31, 2014 So basically you go from being a high-read database most of the time to being a highly transactional database on gamedays, being pounded by both database reads and writes. The services I manage are mainly MS SQL Server, and I'm not too familiar with MSQL, but a database is a database. Also, I'm a manager so that means I don't actually DO any of this stuff any more, I just have people that do. So take this with a grain of salt. Being I/O bound tells me you can do one of three things: 1. Get a DBA to look at the queries that are executing on gameday and see if there are any indexes that can be added or deleted to deal with the load. Made sure scheduled database maintenance is done (index rebuilds, statistics updated, etc) the night before gameday. There's probably tuning to do. 2. Get more I/O via more/faster drives. Some form of striping is what is needed, obviously, and the more drives striped the better. In years past, this has been the cheapest answer and effective. Storage is cheap. You'll also get more milage out of multiple RAIDed SCSI or SATA drives than a few SSDs that cost the same. For the money, the more platters the better! The same money you would save going to multiple striped SATA drives vs. the cost of SCSI or SSDs would probably have a big impact. Platters! 3. Add tons of memory so you pretty much run the DB in memory (or most of it) and then you aren't going to disk as much. I've had to do this, too, because MS SQL is a pain in the ass. But it really works well. Obviously, any combination of the above would get you through this. Then there's the elephant in the room, which is some type of archiving system that saves stuff off somewhere else. Probably not a project you'd like to undertake, but out of anything I've ever seen done it is by far the most effective. Get that database size down to a size it was probably tuned for, and it works wonders.
dickleyjones Posted December 31, 2014 Posted December 31, 2014 sysadmin here. Greg F has nailed it. First, 5 Mbps is not your problem, you should have plenty of throughput available for that. Check that your provider is not limiting your bandwidth, change providers if necessary. Second, the raid. Software raid won't get the job done, especially when it comes to recovery (speed takes a hit too). The array must be hardware controlled and even then you have to be careful that the raid card is legit. Even then, you have to be careful. Sometimes a server will come with 'built-in' hardware raid which is in fact raid software that runs from the BIOS. That's what we call 'fakeraid' and it is garbage. The array MUST BE HARDWARE RAID, accept no substitutions.
SDS Posted December 31, 2014 Author Posted December 31, 2014 I'm in the technology biz. Have over 1000 servers and a wide variety of them sitting in a warehouse right now. All Dell, HP or IBM. Also have techs that can spec out what you need and why. Can provide a donation-like price for this and also examine your lease/rental deal. It probably sucks based on the cost numbers posted. For example, my cost on 48GB DDR3 server RAM is about $250. SDS, look under the covers and contact me if you like. Leasing and colocating are different animals. Clearly the cost savings on colo is appealing - until something goes and it has to be fixed. I'm considering it, but it is a huge roll of the dice.
SDS Posted December 31, 2014 Author Posted December 31, 2014 Right now - here is where I'm at. I sent a note to Softlayer asking for a customer retention price on a modern rig, as that would be easiest. Alternatively, I'm looking at: https://www.digitalocean.com/ per BlueFire's recommendation and http://www.incero.com per many great reviews. They are actually down the road from Softlayer in TX. Digital Ocean is very intriguing based upon their pricing, but there has to be a catch. The $160 tier looks great for every day use with $320 tier for Draft and game days. Any insightful observations there would be great. I appreciate the other offers for hosting, but I have been through a dozen providers in the past and I'm just very particular.
Rockinon Posted December 31, 2014 Posted December 31, 2014 (edited) Here are a couple of alternatives, if you'd like to check them out. http://hostingwithch...mpare-features/ http://hostingwithch...mpare-features/ I know you said you are particular. These are pretty darn good. Also, I can customize by adding additional features. You can also check out the virtual private server options. The 1st link is fully dedicated. The second link is semidedicated and what I believe would be a great fit for you. Here is some information about the actual data center. Just click on the "take a tour" link. http://hostingwithch...ted-datacenter/ This is just one of 5 data centers. Also offer services in data centers located in the UK, Finland, Bulgaria and Australia. The dedicated and semi dedicated servers offer 2.5gigabit connections. You want fast, right? Edited December 31, 2014 by Rockinon
stevestojan Posted December 31, 2014 Posted December 31, 2014 I got a text that Marrone opted out and was expecting Rosen here. Already updated?
boyst Posted January 1, 2015 Posted January 1, 2015 I got a text that Marrone opted out and was expecting Rosen here. Already updated? Yeah, I think the server thing needs some look-see. I'm willing to pony up a few bucks to help keep this from happening.
stevestojan Posted January 1, 2015 Posted January 1, 2015 Yeah, I think the server thing needs some look-see. I'm willing to pony up a few bucks to help keep this from happening. It's New Years eve. Most of us are at least half in the bag. If this news didn't crash the board, there's no reason for an upgrade.
boyst Posted January 1, 2015 Posted January 1, 2015 It's New Years eve. Most of us are at least half in the bag. If this news didn't crash the board, there's no reason for an upgrade. but it is crashing the board. I am getting the oops something went wrong quite a few times. also it's just being very sluggish.
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