We've Had Another Server Upgrade

**Chris Stewart** · 05-04-2009, 02:43 PM

We've been experiencing increased load over the last few weeks and months as new members discover the site. The load has increased so much that Apache essentially begs for forgiveness and crumbles under the pressure. Normally that's not a huge issue. I receive notifications when the site experiences problems and can quickly restart our "slice" with Slicehost. Normal downtime is less than 10 minutes.

However, recently, the effort to bring our system back up has increased. The various services that run iPhone Dev SDK simply get hung up with backlogs of things to do, so even when the site comes back up it can quickly grind to a halt again.

To attempt to keep up with the increasing demand, we've again upgraded the infrastructure used to run the site. We've effectively doubled our capacity and hope to be more prepared for the next upgrade. The next upgrade will likely involve multiple servers with dedicated purposes. We'll keep you up to date as that migration becomes a requirement for an enjoyable experience. Thanks.

Chris

**Steaps** · 05-08-2009, 09:08 PM

Awesome

.

chuck · 05-14-2009, 04:52 AM

Great to hear about the upgrade!

We're still debating between hosting on Slicehost or Linode. How easy was the upgrade on Slicehost? Was it pretty much just add a slice, reboot the machine?

**Chris Stewart** · 05-14-2009, 11:32 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chuck

Great to hear about the upgrade!

We're still debating between hosting on Slicehost or Linode. How easy was the upgrade on Slicehost? Was it pretty much just add a slice, reboot the machine?

Slicehost is great. To upgrade a slice, it's a matter of going into the configuration panel, selecting the new size (dedicated memory is the factor), and hitting submit. The slice is automatically resized and rebooted. Once it's finished, you confirm the change is as expected and you're set. Very simple.