The main aprs.he.fi server was feeling a bit sluggish - it was starting to run out of memory, and it did some swapping. This happened simply because there are so many people looking at the maps at the same time, and fetching real-time updates from the server at a rather high constant rate. So today I separated the web server to another server, and left the database running on the old server computer. This seems to help the situation quite a lot, and did not require a lot of work.
There was a very short outage caused by the change - by accident the new frontend server did not serve your requests for a couple minutes, since I had accidentally forgotten an access list in it's configuration. It only worked for me! Sorry about that.
Maybe in the future I'll try to put together a couple of dedicated frontend servers and start load-sharing web requests between them. Adding a slave database server would make the HA setup almost completely fail-safe. The software I've written seems to support scaling to a cluster with multiple servers just fine. I had hoped it would, since it was designed to, but I didn't try it until now.
The news of https://aprs.fi/ - new features and interesting attractions found in the APRS and AIS worlds.
Have you ever considered doing some load sharing here on the other side of the pond?
ReplyDeleteKeep up the good work -
73 - Matt - N0GIK
Hi Matt,
ReplyDeleteNo, not really. The Internet capacity isn't nowadays the problem usually, we have pretty good connectivity over here. And the hosting is cheap (if it wouldn't be, I couldn't do this).
But if somebody would like to sponsor a server in the US, I wouldn't object. It just needs to be quite fast to be useful (a couple of modern CPUs and 8 gigabytes of memory). Network bandwidth isn't huge, since the bulk of the graphics come from Google.