Awesome news!

[Ashoat]

Hey guys!

 

Two pieces of awesome news.

 

We are now paying for a full 100mbps uplink. That means that since we have no burstability, we have no danger of going over bandwidth quotas. That means that we are going to stop metering bandwidth consumption. Why is this awesome?

1. You don't really need to worry about your bandwidth consumption anymore. That's not to say that you can host huge websites on HelioHost. Shuttling through, say, 100 GiB of PHP traffic monthly will mean a lot of CPU usage, and once we notice the CPU usage we will have to suspend your account.
2. We don't have to run cpanellogd anymore to compile bandwidth usage! This means no more raw analytics, but those are inferior to Google Analytics anyways. cpanellogd has always been a huge user of disk I/O, which is currently the main bottleneck for Stevie.

Today I delivered our new server, Charlie, to our datacenter (Hurricane Electric). I hope to have him configured during Winter Break (end of December). Two big plusses to this new server are:

1. We will be able to isolate essential services (HelioHost.org, HelioNet.org, named, etc.) from the rest of our offerings. This way we can keep in contact with you during downtimes.
2. We will be able to separate dangerous/unstable services (Mono/ASP.NET, Java/JSP, etc.) from safer/more stable ones (PHP, etc.). This way, PHP users won't have to deal with the danger and instability of other platforms, but we will still be able to offer access to the other platforms.

I'm pretty excited! This is costing us a good bit of money, but it should do loads of good for us.

 

Thanks,

djbob

[Byron]

This really is Awesome news. Thanks djbob!

[alteisenriese]

Does it mean faster and more stable?

[enginarc]

An unmetered 100mbps link and physical separation of PHP and Mono, ASP.NET is indeed good news.

 

by the way, a little off-topic but would it be possible to implement some sort of RSS feed for us to monitor bandwidth and other general usage statistics without logging into the cpanel. Or is it already available somewhere

 

again thanks for the effort

[Ashoat]

Okay, I've permanently disabled cpanellogd. We still have some major changes to make, but just turning off cpanellogd brought load down from 9 to around 5 within a couple of minutes.

[Guest Geoff]

I'm really glad that the new server, charlie will be up and running soon, because you had said earlier that it would be up in the fall, but then it got moved back, so I was afraid that might happen again. This is indeed really good news.

[Bad Wolf]

Aweasome!!!

 

I bet Stevie is also gratefull!

[electromoth]

Wow, that's really awesome! I especially appreciate the separation of PHP. ;]

[Ashoat]

I've now also disabled Apache's logging.

[AntisheilaPower]

I'm very excited of the new server I will not get the internal server error anymore congratulations djbob!

[Ashoat]

At this point, the biggest issue we have right now is one of my cron scripts, which is responsible for creating, suspending, and deleting accounts. After trying to create some scripts, it asks cPanel for a list of all accounts so it can check if the accounts are in the list. This takes a long time to do, since cPanel has no database containing a list of all the accounts.

 

I've now replaced that functionality with an easier check in the filesystem, so hopefully that should speed things up.

[Ashoat]

So after all the above changes, the system was still being slow... so I took a look at why that might be. Turns out the script to prune off inactive accounts had an error in it. I had a single excess word in a single line in a single file: "static". Anyways, I've fixed that issue now, so accounts should start being deleted correctly. But altogether, the process to get rid of all the accounts will be rather slow... we can't do it all in one batch because it takes a long time to delete accounts.

 

Hopefully all the zombie accounts should be pruned off in two months or so, by which point Stevie should be running much quicker as a result.

[Guest Geoff]

I hope it won't take two months for charlie to be configured. Are you planning on running stevie and charlie at the same time? Are you going to split the accounts between the two?

[Ashoat]

Splitting accounts between the two would take a huge amount of time. I'm going to be running them at the same time, and once Charlie is set up (hopefully by the end of the month) I'll open signups to both servers.

[egypt]

when exatly are going to lunch the new server