Clardy (Mar 09 2009)

Happy Monday, everybody. It was a pretty smooth weekend, so not much to report there. Today I mostly took care of chores and the less glamorous/interesting side of systems administration. Eric bought a new server for his hydrogren projects. We needed to put it somewhere, so we decided to put it in our current auxiliary rack, which is currently sitting in our other lab waiting to replace one of the smaller (and less useful) racks in the closet. One of the download servers (vader) is actually in this auxiliary rack already. Anyway, we discovered that yet again the rails for this server are ever-so-slightly too big given the current rail configuration. Annoyed but determined Eric and I put forth the effort of taking vader out of this rack (which is why it was offline for an hour there) and adjust the stupid rails. Now everything fits. Good.

To answer PhonAcq's question ("Now what is on the agenda to improve things to the next level of performance??"), there is always some looking ahead to what we'll need soon. First up is more memory in our mysql server (jocelyn). When all is well it can easily handle a mixed bag of 2000 queries/sec, but during peaks or other crises it may start to page and cause massive disk i/o. Given the current memory configuration it'll be quite easy to add 4GB ram to the system, which will help. Of course we're simultaneously scanning different avenues of download/upload bandwidth increase. We still have yet to do the whole project of converting thumper's RAIDs from 5 to 10, which will boost science database (and likewise splitter/assimilator) performance. There's more, but that's a good start.

- Matt
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-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude