Originally Posted by cthree,Jun 28 2010, 12:59 PM

On this coming Thursday July 1st, the servers and the site will be taken offline for a server hardware and software overhaul and upgrades. We have a fairly extensive TODO list to get through so things will be offline for several hours.

The plan is to take the site offline at 12:00PM PDT/03:00PM EDT/07:00PM GMT for approximately 6 to 8 hours.

We apologize for making you work on Thursday afternoon but the upgrades will be well worth the pain.

On tap is additional storage capacity on the web server allowing for more extensive caching (faster page loads) and more storage for photos and stuff. It also will eliminate the need for a NAS machine we currently use to store that sort of thing now bringing our machine count down from 4 to 3 (lower latency, more reliable, less administration and maintenance).

The most significant upgrade aside from the storage capacity of the web server is the installation of a Fusion ioDrive to power the database server.

This bit of kit will jump the database into hyperdrive, several orders of magnitude higher performance than the current HDD RAID array powering the database now. I'm very excited about this hardware acquisition and I can't wait to let it rip. This thing can read AND write the entire database of 18 million posts and 6 million PMs in under 1 minute, something which takes well over an hour presently (WOW!).

It didn't come cheap but I hope the results prove it worthwhile and then some. (700MB/s, 2-26µs read/write latency, 100,000+ IOops/s, 1W of power, crazy sh*t).

The net I expect to be dramatically faster response time and faster pageloads during peak demand periods.

Thanks for your patience and we'll see you on the other side...