Following the previous migration announcement article, I’m proud to tell you this migration happened and went really smoothly in less than 24 hours!

Denis and I have worked a lot on this and the result is really looking good.

The hardware

So, as planned, we chose a Kimsufi 250G(fr). This server is a bit special as we don’t really know what the CPU and memory will be. Of course, we know the minimum specifications but in the end, it is like playing lotterie!

So, let’s see what we’ve got.

The CPU & Memory

Let’s see what we’ve got:

$cat /proc/cpuinfo 
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : AuthenticAMD
cpu family      : 15
model           : 127
model name      : AMD Athlon(tm) Processor LE-1660
stepping        : 2
cpu MHz         : 2800.000
cache size      : 512 KB
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 1
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush 
                  mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt rdtscp lm 3dnowext 3dnow up 
                  rep_good extd_apicid pni cx16 lahf_lm svm extapic cr8_legacy 3dnowprefetch
bogomips        : 5598.82
TLB size        : 1024 4K pages
clflush size    : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes   : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: ts fid vid ttp tm stc 100mhzsteps

Hey, It is the first time I hear about this CPU, a quick look on benchmarks says it is equivalent to an Athlon 64 X2 4200+! Hell, we are really far from the contractual celeron D!

So, as we have an Athlon 64, I’d say we have DDR2 memory chips!

The services

This migration has also been the occasion to do things in a more proper way. Most of the services you used should run unaffected though.

Here is a list of the most notable differences:

Better uptime&speed

We’ve been using the previous server for 2 years. The first year was excellent with a wonderful 1 year uptime. The second one wasn’t that brilliant, with uptimes of less than a week and even less than a day some times.

Theses problems were all related to the SAN being either two slow or disconnected!

Now that we have a local HDD, all theses problems should go away. So far, we’ve found the HDD to be pretty fast :

/dev/sda:
  Timing buffered disk reads:  272 MB in  3.01 seconds =  90.30 MB/sec

This is to be compared to the 1MB/sec throughput of the RPS (which went down to 100KB/s some days).

Arduide&PPassKeeper move to gitorious

This migration has also been the occasion for us to move the Arduide&PPassKeeper GIT repositories from mupuf.org to gitorious. The reason is that we would like to lower the contribution barrier on these two major projects.

Now, it’s up to you to help us!

Mysql→PostgreSQL

As we now have 4 times as much memory, we decided to get rid of mysql to move to PostgreSQL. Both redmine & django were able to cope with the change quite easily. Maybe Denis could give us some feedbacks on this.

Future?

Now that we have a brand new server with a really powerful CPU and a lot of storage space, can we add some services to mupuf.org? Sure!

Here is our plan:

Build bot with regression testing

With such a fast CPU, nothing could prevent us from setting-up our own build bot.

The idea would be to set-up buildbot on our server. Using buildbot will allow us to be informed of any regression(see these examples).

This will force us to write unit tests as much as possible, that’s good.

Denis has already worked with buildbot, he may tell us more about it.

OwnCloud?

With such a storage space, I was thinking of centralizing my favourite files on it. But, I came accross the OwnCloud project which looks very promising. This project is all about privacy and keep our data under OUR control, accessible from everywhere and a fine-grained sharing system.

We may add this to mupuf.org in a close future, the project is too immature at the moment. Be sure I’ll keep you informed of it!

Regressions

Even though we should have broken anything, please report any problem you may encounter.