I think we've been running on a heavily oversubscribed server for a while, and an upgrade would be great.
To begin with, I think that we should consider having more than one server. We can afford multiple servers (we can afford more than $200/month for our server budget). In particular, I think we have two different types of things we want to do with servers: (1) run stable, mature services that are critical to Wesnoth's community (e.g. forums, web site, multiplayer server, content server). (2) allow development of interesting new features for Wesnoth that require server resources. I think a problem we've had is that (1) and (2) sometimes conflict. If somebody wants to develop a new feature -- Gabriel's suggestion of automatic crash reporting is a great example -- there is the fear that while it's in development it might have performance problems (memory usage, disk usage, CPU usage) that interfere with our stable services. I think it'd be nice if we had two good quality servers. One for mature, stable services to reside on, the other for development purposes -- to use in development of new services. I think we can keep our current server as the development server, and obtain a new server that will be the stable server. Then we can start migrating our mature services from the devel server to the new stable server. Any development-grade services would just remain where they are. I think this approach would allow us to have more freedom in locking down and securing our stable server, and giving access to the development server (a little) more freely. As for specs, I think our new server should have a quad core processor, 12GB of memory, two HDD's, each 1TB.. I'd be interested in hearing rationales for a SSD, though I think the 12GB of memory will take care of caching of the filesystem fairly nicely. As for which hosting provider to use, I would say that we want to prioritize reliability over price. Naturally we want competitive pricing but more important than this is a server that will stay up reliably and have staff who can be contacted to help with any issues that arise. David On Sat, Oct 27, 2012 at 5:18 AM, Nils Kneuper <[email protected]>wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > Hi everybody! > During the GSoC mentor summit I talked with noy about our funds and if a > new/upgraded/better server would be possible. The basic conclusion we > reached > was that we really want a significantly stronger machine. One of the > reasons > for this is that the current box, an Intel Core2Duo E6750 @2.66GHz with 5GB > ram and a rather small harddrive is currently running out of capacity. > Another > reason for a possible switch of the server provider is that the current > system > is rather crashy as you can see in the amount of reboots we face. > > The reason for this mail is simple: I wanted to ask you what your current > needs and requirements as well as the expected future requirements are. > Beside > this can you recommend a server provider which has affordable prices? > Currently we pay about 150$ per month for our hosting and the absolute > maximum > we can afford is somewhere at 200$ per month (though less would of course > be > better). > > I already pinged Rhonda and Soliton about a possible new server [1] and > Rhonda > recommended looking at [2] for a new system since the specs and prices > look fine. > > The software requirements the server should be able to handle: > * Linux server (Debian preferred ;) ) with root access > * host for forum (phpbb), wiki (mediawiki) and static websites (apache; > unit > trees, add-on web access, ...) > * host for several add-on server (one per stable series since ??? plus one > for > dev/trunk) > * host for several multiplayer server (one per stable series since 1.6 plus > dev and trunk) > * host for irssi for at least some devs (e.g. Soliton is running an irssi > instance on wesnoth.org IIRC) > * lots of space for replays (currently we use >100GB only for replays!) > * ability to run scripts regularly (e.g. gettext update and unit website > generation) > > We are currently already relying on swap usage on wesnoth.org, so more > than > 5GB ram sounds reasonable to me. What I currently think would be sane > minimum > specs: > * quadcore cpu > * >=8GB ram > * >=1TB persistent storage e.g. for replays > * 2 harddrives so that we can at least have some local backups (currently > we > got a 160GB harddrive for backups) > > Optional but possibly sane: > * ssd for IO intense parts like the mysql database used for forums and wiki > * more cpu cores, drive space and ram > * >1 server, possibly one in the EU and one in the US (depends on costs > and if > we really have a usecase for the extra server) > > If you know of further requirements and might have a more detailed list of > specs we need, please reply to this mail. The same applies if you can offer > some feedback regarding the server provider and their reliability. > > Cheers, > Nils Kneuper aka Ivanovic > > > > [1] http://wesnoth.org/irclogs/2012/10/%23wesnoth-dev.2012-10-23.log > [2] https://www.server4you.de/root-server/ > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > Version: GnuPG v2.0.19 (GNU/Linux) > > iEYEARECAAYFAlCL0RsACgkQfFda9thizwXEvwCcCUrREqkJFdZFnYmxOpwt6IOy > sUgAnjg7B0+fh37Ivl4vaJxcFM4seCJO > =o2Bt > -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- > > _______________________________________________ > Wesnoth-dev mailing list > [email protected] > https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev >
_______________________________________________ Wesnoth-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev
