Welcome to a New HN: Site Performance Update

JonDMiller

JonDMiller

Publisher/Founder
(deep breath)

It's 1:20 in the morning on Thursday, and we have successfully migrated the website off of godaddy's inadequate servers onto a new server with a different webhost. I will share more details on that in the next day or so, because if all goes well, there is a great story behind this. During the day Wednesday, all I could cling to was that something good would come from all of these issues. I think it has and will.

At any rate, it may have taken some of you longer to get here than others...that's due to DNS propagation, or how your ISP recognizes where to send you when you typed in the hawkeyenation url, or clicked on your bookmark to get here. I performed a DNS flush to make sure I arrived at the proper site. There is a version of this site that still exists on godaddy's servers, but if you went to those forums, it said something about site maintenance. Nevermind that, if you are reading this, you are on the new servers.

The last two days have been a painful learning experience and a frustrating time. I know it was frustrating for many of you to not be able to get the information you normally get from this site, especially on signing day, which is one of the biggest traffic days of the year that we can plan for...

We waiting until after the bowl game to make the move to godaddy so we would not have any site disruptions...irony, huh?

Back in December, when Kirk and Gary held the drug testing press conference, this site had it's biggest traffic day ever...and we had some slow loading issues. Our server load averages were exceeding our RAM levels, and we were redlining...we were told by godaddy their solution would alleviate that as well as make the site more secure.

While they delivered on making the site more secure, their server capacity they recommended to us was ill equipped to handle the traffic of this site, as we had four instances in the past 15 days where the site was down. While we were at 12 to 15 on the heavy day back in December, godaddy was struggling at a 5 to 6 load level this week.

The new servers we are on, and the new service we have, is scaleable. We have more processors, 8 CPU's and the load will be evenly distributed. If we have 'red line' time periods, or traffic spikes and our load exceeds 8 for more than a few minutes, our hosting company is alerted and we get more juice...think of it as if you are on a two lane highway and you want to pass and do it in a hurry...step on the gas, you accelerate when you need it, let off the gas after the pass and back to normal speed.

That's the case here.

I am excited to put it through the paces.

There may be a few bugs to work out as there always is with a server migration...please alert us in this thread if you see anything that looks out of the norm, or if you have repeated performance issues. I can relay this information to the webhost an we can optimize things around here.

Again, I am sorry for how this site has performed in recent days and weeks. It was unacceptable, and I had made the determination to move away from godaddy as of Tuesday. Then Wednesday hit, and I was flabbergasted. And thanks to the power of twitter, we moved this site in little more than six hours and its up and running on a new server..that is no small task, and I look forward to sharing the story..its a good one.

I hope it has a happy ending on Thursday as we put the new server under load.

Thanks
 
Hey Jon I'd love to here as much of the technical details as possible along with the name of your new provider as I periodically do a bit of computer consulting on the side with the web hosting typically getting outsourced to folks such as GoDaddy, Rackspace, PowerDNN, etc.
 
Already I can tell that there is a significant site load improvement over the past few weeks. It seemed that even with my fast network access at home that the pages would load very slowly. That seems to be much improved now, which is great to see.

I think that this will be a good move in the long run and hopefully *knocking on wood* it will be able to handle whatever we throw at this site.

Good luck with this migration and hopefully the worst is past us. :)
 
This is working much better. Loading faster, performing better. Big fan. I know we were all a little frustrated, but it appears to have worked out for the better.
 
Jon, seems to be working great. Speaking as a Hawkeye fan only, and not as owner of this site, I hope you don't have a overwhelming traffic day for a long time. Unfortunately good news doesn't load the site with visitors, it's the bad news, and lets hope we have seen enough of that for awhile.
 
Let's see how this thing does all day before we start lighting up just yet :) Some people have not made it here yet as their DNS has not propagated.
 
Jon, Thanks for your efforts. I'm sure yesterday was pretty stressful for you too. The site does seem to have a bit better load speed to it.

There seems to be a couple of threads and conversation that was started last evening, mostly in regards to the recruiting day and certain recruits. As well as some posts regarding the presser. Are those left and lost on the old server then? Or will they be updated and moved over as well?

Thanks again for the site and for the concerns to keep it developing.
 
With a post a few minutes there was a "log.adap.tv" server process that seemed to hang me up a bit ... probably 30 seconds. Also seemed to be processes grabbing quite a bit of user info. I don't necessarily object to that -- know it's important for the advertisers who pay the bills. Just saying...

On the whole, though, the site loads and responds a whole lot faster.

Thank you for all of your hard work the past few weeks and especially yesterday and last night (into the wee morning hours). Truly amazed you managed to pull off the site migration, conduct the recruit chat, write the Iowa-MSU game story last night, and Lord knows what else you did.

Gracias, Amigo!
 
Some folks have complained about the Video player...that thing actually loads lightning fast...a few of the other ad code slots, like yardbarker, those don't. I am going to mention something to them about kicking up some notches on the speed of their ad servers. That can sometimes create a second or two lag. As long as it takes two seconds or less, consistently, to load a page, I can live with that. When it goes beyond that, it's time to get out the microscope
 
PhotoHawk said:
Hey Jon I'd love to here as much of the technical details as possible along with the name of your new provider as I periodically do a bit of computer consulting on the side with the web hosting typically getting outsourced to folks such as GoDaddy, Rackspace, PowerDNN, etc.
Click to expand...

I will share the story and the provider sometime tomorrow. I can tell u what they have done, the time they have committed and the service they are providing, the suggestions and solutions they are offering, is unlike anything I have experienced as a consumer in any genre in my life
 
JonDMiller said:
I will share the story and the provider sometime tomorrow. I can tell u what they have done, the time they have committed and the service they are providing, the suggestions and solutions they are offering, is unlike anything I have experienced as a consumer in any genre in my life
Click to expand...

Having migrated two sites (much smaller) in my time, I applaud you for the quick turn on HN. Must be working with a really great team.
 
This webhost guy is giving me all kinds of feedback today..things that no other host has every provided..I am in awe of this service. He has found a couple things that I think can be changed, which will increase the page load efficiency and be a much smaller drain on processing resources. It's really unreal what he has done in less than 24 hours.
 
Well hell, let's kick the tires on this sumbitch! Call the Iowa Athletic Department and tell them to put "Disaster No. 5" into effect and let's see how this sucker handles a global meltdown!
 
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