After all, adding a turbo is fast, but, a turbo with a little nitrous is even better.

I don't know about the nitrous part, but, it seems our club website is almost double the performance in the last 24 hours since our new engine was installed. What say you?

Yesterday we completed the migration to a new server. Here are the specs about the change.

Old Server:

HP DL360 G5

4GB RAM

Single Intel Processor (dual core)

Single Power Supply

2 OS Drives (mirrored)

2 Data Drives (mirrored)

Both OS and Database were combined (striped) to a single partition.

New Server:

HP DL380 G5

8GB RAM

Dual Intel Processors (both dual core)

Dual power supplies

5 OS Drives (RAID 5)

3 Database Drives (RAID 5)

OS and Database installed on two separate partitions.

In this new configuration, we are able to gain speed with several improvements. The DL380 system itself is faster. It has dual processors where we used to have a single. It has 8GB RAM where we used to have 4GB. The second power supply doesn't make it faster, but, it helps keep us online in case of a failure. We moved to a RAID5 for both the OS and the database partitions where our old system only had a mirror. RAID5 improves read and write access times. And, the last change was probably one of the most significant. The database was moved to its own partition. I have been reading a lot about improving database performance and this was at the top of the list. By separating the database from the OS and web partition we are able to gain significant I/O speed. There are other ways to improve this even further, but, I'll stick to this simple idea for now. In the future we may look at separating the database to a whole different machine or even going to a database cluster. We can work on that one as the site progresses another couple of years.

All-in-all, I think the changes we have made to the hardware side will improve your experience here at the CZCC. As always, please let me know if you see any issues and, better yet, let me know how much you like the change to your new engine. You now have a fast car.

So far, performance improvement noted.

Difference of night and day for me - lightening fast!!

Thank you Mike for all of your work. This site is invaluable!