velospace: Doubling Server Specs
If you’ve used velospace lately you’ve probably noticed some slowness, downtime, and generally crappy service. Sorry.
The trials and tribulations of velospace’s growth and impact on server architecture is documented in this blog and on the status updates twitter feed.
velospace was running on a MediaTemple Dedicated Virtual Base with upgrades for a total of 768mb of RAM.
velospace is now running on a MT DV Extreme with 2gb of RAM.
The problem with the old setup was that the virtualization software, Virtuozzo, has hard coded memory limits for processes. When velospace usage resulted in high load and memory use (e.g. when the site got a spike in traffic) Virtuozzo would hit its memory limit (kmemsize), shut down the Apache process for 5 minutes and then reestablish the process. MediaTemple doesn’t have Virtuozzo set up to allocate additional memory (in a burst-type configuration) when necessary - the software just kills processes.
The new server setup should take care of things for a while. In addition to more than double the amount of RAM the DV Extreme also has more CPU cycles allocated which should keep the site smoother under heavy load.
If you have any questions drop me a line.
- Greg