The servers are racked up and we’re busily getting them prepared to go live. We’re planning to effect a very smooth changeover – the load balancer will be using HAProxy which means we can switch the DNS over in advance but proxy the site from the old server until we are ready. At that point, we take the site down, transfer a database snapsnot, reconfigure HAProxy to use the new servers and bring it back up.
More news as it happens!
Past month has been pretty busy workwise getting a new product ready for launch, and I’ve been in the US the past week.
Should be getting the new geograph servers racked up sometime this week though. I had some problems getting Ubuntu on the NAS server, but thankfully Debian Sarge installed just fine, so we’re almost good to go!
Interesting post on the memcached mailing list about how Digg are using Memcached for session storage. Memcached is intended as a caching layer, but after their session database crashed, they simply went with using Memcached for session storage period.
The new Geograph setup should wind up with around 10GB of memcached space across 5 nodes, and I was hoping to do something similar for session storage. It sounds like the Digg system barely broke a sweat doing this as their memcached nodes were already being hit much harder by their main application.
If it’s good enough for Digg, it’s good enough for Geograph!