GPWA website server upgrade planned

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30 June 2010, 1:51 pm
MichaelCorfman

GPWA website server upgrade planned

Just a quick note to let folks know we will be migrating the GPWA website to new web servers in the near future. Our current web server has gotten overloaded, and the response time of the site can suffer as a result.

The new pair of servers we ordered arrived this past week, and we are currently in the process of installing and testing the site on the new servers. As part of the migration we are upgrading from Windows 2003 to Windows 2008 R2 and from IIS version 6 to IIS version 7.5.

The actual server migration should be instantaneous and should not result any any downtime when it is made because we will just move the ip address from the old platform to the new one once everything is working smoothly.

We expect that the upgrade will be performed within the next week if everything goes smoothly, and within the next couple weeks even if there are some unanticipated issues that need to be resolved.

I will post in this thread more specific information about when the migration will take place as our plans are finalized.

The web server migration will be the first step in a number of platform upgrades we will be performing in the first part of the summer (or winter for those of you who live down under). Subsequent steps will include migrating to a new mySQL database server for use by vBulletin and also to the new vBulletin version 4.0. These changes will pave the way for the new GPWA version 4.0 website currently under development.

Michael
2 July 2010, 7:23 am
Nandakishore

Is the migration already in process? The server response today is extremely slow.
2 July 2010, 9:16 am
Chips

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nandakishore

Is the migration already in process? The server response today is extremely slow.

+1 Slow is not the word, feels like 300 baud connection. zzzzzz
8 July 2010, 11:43 am
MichaelCorfman

No, the migration has not happened yet. Currently we anticipate the migration will be performed early next week. Right now we are targeting Monday, July 12th.

When the transition does happen there will not be a period of poor performance associated with the migration. We will be running on the existing server with the existing load one second, and then on the new faster server with a lighter load the next second.

What was happening earlier in the week is that there were some issues with our ad server, and those issues were having a very, very, very bad effect on page load times. Over the longer term we need to look to see if there is a way to restructure the way web pages on the GPWA website are constructed so that issues in displaying advertisements do not impact other aspects of page rendering.

Michael
8 July 2010, 6:23 pm
Renee

I've noticed that the sites runs very slow for me when I'm on internet explorer but I never have issues on firefox.. Might be a good idea to use FF to browse GPWA guys.
12 July 2010, 12:24 pm
MichaelCorfman

The GPWA website was moved to the new web servers a few minutes ago. Hopefully no one noticed any glitches in the process.

Michael
12 July 2010, 12:35 pm
thepokerkeep

Quote:

Originally Posted by Renee

I've noticed that the sites runs very slow for me when I'm on internet explorer but I never have issues on firefox.. Might be a good idea to use FF to browse GPWA guys.

Hi Renee

I use FF pretty much exclusively and have experienced times where the site loads incredibly slowly. Sometimes I quit trying and cruise the other forums for a while then return here to see if the server woken up from it's nap yet.

Michael, the migration went well - only a few minutes of down time.
12 July 2010, 5:33 pm
Nandakishore

Good job! I haven't noticed any disturbance today.
13 July 2010, 3:46 pm
MichaelCorfman

Earlier in this thread I had indicated that some issues with our ad server were responsible for some issues with the time required to render pages on the GPWA website.

Quote:

Originally Posted by MichaelCorfman

What was happening earlier in the week is that there were some issues with our ad server, and those issues were having a very, very, very bad effect on page load times. Over the longer term we need to look to see if there is a way to restructure the way web pages on the GPWA website are constructed so that issues in displaying advertisements do not impact other aspects of page rendering.

I'm pleased to say that we have now implemented a solution to this issue. We have placed all of our advertisements within iframes. That way they will load completely independently of the rest of our page content and so the main content of pages should load more quickly.

We still have one more area to improve performance: as stated earlier in this thread we are going to migrate the mySQL databased used by vBulletin to a new server also. But hopefully the changes we have made already have made a difference.

After that performance upgrade is complete we will move on to migrating to vBulletin version 4.0.

Michael