First day on the new servers

One small issue: the eQSL applications were reporting the time as 1 hour ahead of the correct time that is set in Windows. I fixed that by overriding the Java Runtime Engine's default of British Summer Time instead of what I wanted, which was GMT!

Everything is going smoothly the first day on the new servers. I managed to get some sleep from 0700 to 1200 UTC.

I am adding a 1 Terabyte disk to my backup server, located in Houston Texas (so I have a catastrophic backup in the event of a disaster in Dallas). That disk should come online in a few minutes, and I will start making backups of the Application server and the Database server.

Your logger that does Real-Time uploads of ADIF logs might fail occasionally over the next 72 hours. This is because the eQSL.cc domain name may take up to 3 days to propagate all around the world. There is nothing that can be done, except to wait a day and try again. In many regions, the eQSL.cc domain is already working properly, pointing to the new servers without a change in the URL to www.QSLCard.com. It should not take more than about 72 hours for this to occur.

If you logged into www.eQSL.cc but now your URL says www.QSLCard.com you can try logging out, then point your browser again to www.eQSL.cc and log in again. If it stays logged into wwww.eQSL.cc then you are all set. If it redirects you to www.QSLCard.com then your area does not yet have the updated eQSL.cc routing. Just wait another few hours.

In any event, everybody is now on the new servers and can use the system without limitations with their browser.


The system is running much faster from what I have been able to see. Right now I am seeing over 90 users logged in, and the longest wait for a database response has been on the order of 20 seconds, compared with 10 minutes or longer on the old machine.

Even the Power Users screen, which used to take 2 or 3 minutes (if it didn't timeout first) now only takes a few seconds to display.

The new application server is easily able to handle those 90 users, and has never had to process more than 2 users at the same time, because it is handling their requests so fast. On the old machines, it was quite normal to have 10 to 20 users being processed simultaneously.

Most of the speed improvements are the result of the new database server, which has 24 Gigabytes of memory, along with 5 hard disk, of which 4 provide fully redundant, mirrored and striped (RAID 10) data storage spinning at 15,000 RPM for the database, and the 5th of which is a 1 Terabyte disk for storing database backups.

Please don't report any errors yet, unless they involve money ;) so we can have a chance to find errors ourselves and fix them. Otherwise you may overwhelm our email support volunteers with questions they cannot answer.

If everything continues to go this well, I will eliminate the time delays on the OutBox (I have already reduced it from 10 minutes to 1 minute) and the InBox, and other screens.

If you have questions or comments, feel free to post them here on this blog.

73!
Dave