This weekend we’ll be performing the second half of our server network overhaul for our Cerb4 On-Demand service.  This will affect all *.cerb4.com websites for a short time.

Here’s the plan:

• We’ll be updating all helpdesks to the latest stable build (that’s currently 638 if all goes well in QA for Weds).  There are a lot of optimizations in this build that came from monitoring our hosted helpdesk network under higher loads.  While already fast, the improvements should be noticeable all around.
• We’ll be migrating most helpdesks to our newer hardware: Dual Quad Core (8 cores) Harpertown servers, 6GB RAM, 500GB RAID-1.
• The new machines have off-RAID storage for local backups, which should fix the issues with brief slowdowns around nightly backups and maintenance (~10PM Pacific).  A current limitation of most of the existing machines is they’re in 1U rackmounts with limited drive slots.  We keep nightly backups on the local disks and we off-site 2x a week (Weds and Sat).  Local backups are kept uncompressed to not bog down the live machines.
• We’ll be balancing server populations according to resource usage and our monitoring.  This ensures everyone has plenty of performance and room to grow.
• With the increased memory and lower server populations we’ll be enabling APC (PHP compile cache) and memcached (shared memory cache) for most helpdesks.  We’ve seen average page generation times of 5-10ms on most of the highest traffic helpdesks we’ve been testing these options with.

We’ll try to get everyone upgraded and on the new hardware during the window this weekend.  It’s a lot of data to move around.  We’ll post another followup if we need to break the upgrade up over a second weekend.

Send us an e-mail and we’ll schedule you sooner if you’d like to have your hosted helpdesk moved earlier to take advantage of the ever-increasing performance.

Thanks!

-Jeff@WGM