September 2015 Performance
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September is always a tough month with a huge number of our regular posters tied up for a week in Austin. Makes it very hard to maintain numbers. A respectable month, but down a lot from August.
That "pushing a half million" is also "way down" is kind of a victory, in a way.
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And the posts...
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For those wondering, we are already over those views already in October and today is only the 21st. We have ten days to go, all of it over that number! October is looking to be a really great month, very much back on track.
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What size server do you have running the site?
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@johnhooks said:
What size server do you have running the site?
Two vCPUs, 2GB RAM
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@scottalanmiller said:
@johnhooks said:
What size server do you have running the site?
Two vCPUs, 2GB RAM
That's amazing.
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@johnhooks said:
That's amazing.
Not even breaking a sweat. Runs several other, smaller, communities too. Like Gamrhaus and Kidding Around Europe. We figure that we could handle between 10,000,000 and 100,000,000 views a month without having any need for a larger instance.
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And no CDN either, for AJAX callback performance reasons. So everything that you see is coming directly from the server.
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It's amazing the performance you can get from nginx.
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@johnhooks said:
It's amazing the performance you can get from nginx.
nGinx isn't serving out anything. It's only a forward proxy to handle HTTP Header redirection. It's not doing any of the work.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@johnhooks said:
It's amazing the performance you can get from nginx.
nGinx isn't serving out anything. It's only a forward proxy to handle HTTP Header redirection. It's not doing any of the work.
Ooh. I did a builtwith to see and just figured that's what you were using.
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We did not originally even use it but it is good practice to have it. It is actually slowing the site down rather than speeding it up!
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That is an incredibly fast, tiny VM. It is on Rackspace, right? I've seen that mentioned before.
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Yeah, it is on Rackspace.... found the posting right after I posted.... and you said.... but we have talked about moving it to Digital Ocean to get even more performance at a lower price. With those Floating IPs that they announced today there is even more incentive to make the switch. RS has had a lot of support issues this year, so I assume that that will be a factor in possibly moving?
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You posted the DO bit earlier today, that's why I had been thinking that.
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LOLYes, RS now, DO is under consideration. That floating IP would give us more comfort going there for sure.
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@StrongBad said:
RS has had a lot of support issues this year, so I assume that that will be a factor in possibly moving?
Yes, we have had some real support scares here and I've had support issues dealing with RS for other things. They are anything but cheap, too, which does not make them an ideal long term candidate.
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I like the "slide to Paginate" option on Mango. Trying it out as the issues on mobile are maddening. Chrome and Firefox both show the same signs. Not sure if Cyanogen is the culprit, but no other sites have given me the same compatibility problems. Desktop is perfect. The real-time refresh even on mobile is a welcomed feature.
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We are not touching our CPUs but getting another little bit of memory would be great. 2GB is anemic, but we don't swap. Getting up to 2.5GB would be plenty. No one offers that, though. We would have to make the jump to 4GB which is just not warranted at this time.
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One of the most amazing things is that we are getting this incredible performance while serving out an incredible number of page updates (the number of "views" that you see is small compared to the number of page requests as recurring requests from the same place don't get counted, so the monitoring system hitting it every few seconds isn't in that count, for example) all from an old 2.6 version of MongoDB which is much slower than MongoDB 3.x. We can't move to MongoDB 3.x because we are on too new of a version of Ubuntu. Go figure. Not happy about how poorly Ubuntu handles MongoDB updates. But once we are able to update MongoDB, we should see a real performance boost.
