Posts made by creayt

@tim_g "Would not do it" meaning what, you'd buy the Dell certified SSDs? Aren't those like 4-10x the market value/price of similar options?

@dustinb3403 Building the Raid itself takes under 2 minutes, but each server restart seems to take forever ( at least a minute or two or three or four ) because of how slow the configuring RAM and etc. is, so good point.

@dustinb3403 It's a community style site that's some kind of hybrid between Reddit and something like Mango Lassi, so the more users I get, the more content they'll generate ( mostly in the form of MySQL data ) and the more footprint I'll need, eventually having to go cloud probably if it takes off. But will be a huge volume of small database writes happening pretty much 24/7.

@tim_g What are the implications of this, do you know? For what it's worth none of these drives do the amber light thing in either server, all green and they report as SSDs etc. in the lifecycle tooling.

@creayt Also forgot to bring up that Raid 0 also gives me way more capacity right so it'd give me terabyte(s) more before I had to scale to extra hardware? Can't remember how much Raid 5 subtracts.

Let me ask this.

The only thing that'll be stored on each Raid 0/5 is

The MySQL data files ( not the MySQL installation )
and
The image uploads

So if a drive in the Raid 0 fails, I simply replace the drive, recreate the virtual disk, and then copy the database and images, which I think takes just a few minutes w/ two systems of this caliber 1U away from each other especially w/ so many cores to spare ( won't be competing w/ the load of the live site ).

So, since I have to drive an SSD over to the datacenter 10 minutes away, open the box, and get it in, a few more minutes for the copy feels like it'll be negligibly more time than if it failed w/ a Raid 5, where it would stay online ( though I don't know if my set up lets you do the Raid 5 replacement while the OS is running, maybe it does, or maybe I just hot swap the drive I'm not sure ).

So, because the full penalty for a Raid 0 failing vs. a Raid 5 in my set up is basically a few more minutes to copy the stuff manually, seems like the performance improvements would be worth the gamble. Is that logic sound or do y'all think just keeping the array online is better so 5 is the way to go anyway?

@dashrender I care about it, but because it's automatically replicated after each write there's a fully up-to-date, ready-to-go backup of it the next U down at all times. Could/would also push nightly backups offsite somewhere I suppose.

Looks like Raid 5 for SSDs can also, possibly, shorten their lifespan because of the parity writes: https://serverfault.com/questions/513909/what-are-the-main-points-to-avoid-raid5-with-ssd

I was wrong, it looks like you can fully automatically fail over to the slave and set it as the new master w/ the latest MySQL set up, so that makes the decision a bit easier.

As far as Raid 5 instead of 0, I'd thought that the performance of Raid 5 was absolutely terrible and that almost no one used it anymore, is that a wrong memory?

I have 2 servers. Other than one having 4 more processor cores total, the servers are identical. Specs are:

R620
a: 2x octacore xeon, b: 2x decacore xeon
128GB ram each
1GB Perc H710P RAID controller
2x 256GB Samsung 850 Pros ( Os and installs live here, Raid 1 )
5x 1TB Samsung 850 Pros ( Data and file uploads live here, Raid 0 ) ( can add 1 more on the decacore and up to 3 more on the octacore later if desired, but this RAID controller gets pretty saturated at 4-5 from what I've read )

My question is, I like the benefits of not having to leave the box to go from app code to database as the goal of this project is for it to be as absolutely instant and fast feeling as possible, so my plan is to basically configure the servers like so
Full serverware stack on each ( IIS, app server, MySQL )
One of the two will be the MySQL master and replicate to the other ( all writes will go to this server )
The other server will be the image upload and processing box, and final images will all be copied to the other server in the background
The two machines will be clustered for all web traffic save those two uses ( db writes and file uploads )
Both will be ready, w/ just a few minutes downtime, to take over the full workload should the other fail, which includes a disk in either Raid 0 failing

The plan would be
If any piece of the DB master server fails, it drops out of the picture until I can get the failure resolved, and the 2nd server takes over all duties. The only piece I can't automate is the switch from slave to master, which I would handle manually and up to an hour of downtime is acceptable

If any piece of the image processing server fails, all traffic would automatically go to the other server until I can resolve the failure, and no perceptible downtime would occur

The only thing running on these servers will be a hobby project I made, and I'm ok w/ a little downtime in the event of a presumably unlikely hardware failure.

What do you think? Is this a completely unorthodox approach? I like the idea of most web site requests being able to go through either server so I can make use of the horsepower of both of them and my goal is to make the fastest web site I've ever used so keeping the db and app code that touch each other on the same machine is ideal for me, as is using high-performance-within-my-budget techniques like a Raid 0 of SSDs.

Let me know what you think, I'm a programmer not a server pro so there may be a ton of negatives I haven't though of in this set up.

Thanks!

Link seems to not work.

@scottalanmiller Hahahah, I don't even know. I can't remember when I stopped logging in. Just workin and stuff I suppose.

Was actually researching some server RAID stuff today which randomly re-led me to a post on Mango.

Planning on firing up Lone Echo on my Oculus this weekend. Anyone played that yet?

@NattNatt

They just have you pick a region, and I do US West. But the in-game party system makes it easy to get in on the new game, add me ( creaytor, picture of Harrison Ford as the profile image ) and we'll Dota down!

The only thing I even play is Dota, but I it.

@Breffni-Potter That's helpful thanks. I'll check out my BIOS which I think is pretty locked down but we'll see.

@Breffni-Potter

How do you do that? Overclock the base. That's what I need to do, right now my base is 3.3 ( stock ) but my turbo is 4.5, I need to get the base up. I'm using XTU if that helps.

@Breffni-Potter Can you over clock the base frequency or just the turbo boost?

@Breffni-Potter

You actually beat my score on this by about 100 points, trying to figure out wtf. My best guess is that since your base clock is 4.0 and mine is 3.3 that was the difference. I wonder if there's a way to OC my base clock and not just the turbo boost ceiling. Anyone know on this? here are my XTU settings.

@Breffni-Potter "RAPID was specifically designed to not add any additional risk to user or system data, even in the event of a power-loss. In fact, RAPID strictly adheres to Windows
conventions in its treatment of any buffered writes in DRAM -- RAPID obeys all
“flush” commands, so any writes buffered by RAPID will make it to the persistent
media just like the Windows OS cache or the HDD cache. "

@creayt Time of that writing is the release of the 840 EVO, so they may've changed some things since its release but very informative.