SongTrellis
Music and Musical Know-how For You

Author:  David Luebbert Posted:  4/8/04; 9:24:02 AM Msg#:  4153 (top msg in thread) Prev/Next:  4152/4154 Reads:  1160

Testing a new server

The SongTrellis site has been running since 1999 on a Dell server which was very fast and had a large capacity for its day. We took delivery on a new Dell PowerEdge a few weeks ago, and have been configuring the new machine to take over from the old one. The new machine is seven times faster and has about 100 times the disk storage of the old one.

When the new machine runs reliably, I would expect that the site will feel a little bit snappier as you browse around on it. When it's necessary to save a new copy of the SongTrellis website's site database, which happens whenever someone posts a new message or new tune to the site, it would take nearly a full minute for that task to complete, during which all folks who browse the site were locked out. With the new machine, I would expect those outage intervals to be reduced to five or six seconds.

With all of the additional disk space on the new server machine, I intend to let composers post MP3 versions of their work to SongTrellis on an experimental basis.

When folks post MIDI versions of their works,  I have always promised that I will carry that work on the SongTrellis for as long as I run the site.

 I intend to allow folks to post .mp3 format files to the new server, but because of the many times larger file size for tunes recorded in that format I will review mp3 postings before I promise to give them perpetual listings on the site. If  I don't promise to list an mp3 forever, I will retain it as long as I can but then will flush it from the server when I feel that disk space is getting short.

I am unable to predict what effect serving mp3s will have on the response time that folks recieve when they visit SongTrellis. If visitors start getting intolerable wait times because of the volume of mp3s that are being served, I may be forced to shut down mp3 offerings or charge the composer to post them so I can afford to provide adequate  bandwidth to serve  them in a timely fashion.

About ten days ago, we tried to bring the site up on the new machine and ran on it for a few hours. As is typical with first use situations we encountered enough software problems that we had to go back to running on the old server for awhile longer.

We're going to serve SongTrellis from the new machine for a few hours this morning, to see if running with a new version of the Userland Frontier webserver eliminates some of the bad behavior we saw previously. Most likely we'll have trouble again and will revert back to the old machine for awhile longer. I do hope that we will be able to run entirely on the new machine in a few weeks.

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