Up-time Stats for July 2010

From our Fort Lauderdale, Florida testing center:
July 1 to August 1, 2010

2,973 attempts,
2,973 successful hits,
100.00% up-time
Average response time: 3.33 seconds for page load

System will be down 0400 to 0500 July 19 UTC

During the conversion to the new server farm, I failed to create one of the index files that is necessary for the Account Manager to work properly. Without this index, it takes about 30 minutes for the screen to load, which makes the program totally useless. With the index in place, it takes a few seconds.

Unfortunately, it will take about an hour to create this index file, during which time the entire system has to be taken out of service.

The Account Manager is the only tool that will allow you to split your account into multiple accounts, with different time periods or QTHes, and that will move the eQSLs around to the proper new account automatically.

We are going to bite the bullet and create the index tonight, July 18 at 11pm Central Time, which is 0400 UTC July 19. Hopefully it will take less than 1 hour, but we really have no idea how long the index creation will take on these new faster servers.

73,
Dave N5UP

New System is working great!

So far, the new system has been working fantastically well. With a maximum of 240 simultaneous browser connections, the application server has been running at a maximum of 10% CPU utilization. Meanwhile, the database servers is still serving over 99.5% of all database requests directly from memory instead of requiring a disk access.

Scary? I'll tell you what's scary... and sad...

Turning out the lights on 2 servers that have served you perfectly, without a hiccup, for 2 1/2 years, deleting all the files, hoping you did get everything moved over, checking your backup and your off-city backup, and then checking it all again, and then entering the service cancellation order and logging off for the last time.

Sad, and just a tad scary.

I am making this post from my iPhone to test the ability to post status information even if all the computers are down. This concludes the test.

The System is Up

The Application Server has been handling over 200 connections with less than 10% of the CPU resources.

The Database Server has been returning an average of 99.62% of the queries from memory without requiring a disk access.

A full day on the new servers

A full day of operation in which a couple of bugs were pointed out and fixed, but otherwise everything ran relatively smoothly. The only outstanding problem I'm aware of is that the Account Manager had to be disabled because it needs a new index, and I have to take down the entire system for an hour to build that index.

I'm looking at the performance monitor, and it shows 184 user connections only used a maximum of 9% of the CPU resource on the application server. Very cool.

The database server is the real hero here. It is able to keep almost a quarter of the entire database in memory, so that requests for data can be served from memory instead of requiring a disk access. My list of long-running queries shows the worst offenders to be running about 12 seconds. On the old servers, there were some queries that ran for 5 or 6 minutes!

Now that I can take a few minutes to actually breathe, there are 251 cards in the queue needing to be printed and mailed. Picked a bad day to run out of inkjet ink and card stock.