[clue-admin] Future Web Site

[Dan Kulinski]

I wasn't taking anything personally, more or less stating where I was at
and what I can attempt to do.  I am pretty laid back and unless you say
"Dan is a lazy bastard" (which can be true depending on the task at hand),
then I don't take it personally.  But what the project need is someone to
charge ahead.  I'm doing it now (well, when I am off work today).  I love
figuring out how the cogs work and making them work.  I may not be creative
but i can get all the pieces together.

Why would MySQL have to be rewritten?  Why not go in a multi-master
replication?  Traffic wouldn't be high enough to cause problems.  Yes you
could lose out on an update due to higher latency.

As for MySQL performance, I have tuned the key and table caches so
hopefully we aren't hitting NFS' inherent latency too hard.  Yes I/O can
become a problem on a VPS.

I am not saying Drupal is the right answer but I am trying to not reinvent
the wheel.  There was previous work for a drupal based site and I am trying
to capitalize on that.

The crashed hardware wasn't solved using vmotion, although that would be
great.  Heck there are even projects for memory mirroring for KVM.  The
hardware underneath the VPS suffered a fatal problem and my VPS was
reprovisioned on on new platform.  It took 5 minutes from the time of crash
until my website was back up.  My point was that the hardware my VPS runs
on is just as vulnerable as your server with RAID, dual PSUs and such.
However there are a hundred boxes just like it in the datacenter and when
the hardware breaks I am quickly and nearly effortlessly moved to a new
piece of hardware and recovered quickly.  So yes, a VPS is a single point
of failure but the data center helps to mitigate that.

As for a distributed web site, this is a large technical hurdle.  I have a
hard enough time making all my compute nodes play together well and they
are connected through a single switch with low latency.  It is an
interesting project but far enough above my head I can't contribute much.

Finally, for a shell, I can offer that.  This VPS is mostly idle.  I'll set
up an account and forward you the details.  Is this an account to share or
just something you would like to personally dabble with?

Thanks,
  Dan Kulinski



On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 9:38 AM, Raymond de Roo <rderoo at deroo.net> wrote:

> Dan--
>
> > Alright, separating out by functionality is just fine.  But you all act
> as if a VPS is a single point of failure.  This isn't completely true.  In
> a sense, if the host machine fails your instance is down until it is
> migrated.  The last time this happened my site was down for 5 minutes and
> they called me to let me know what was happening before I knew about it.
>  The RAID is not local to the box, it is network based.
>
> A VPS, kvm, bare metal machine *is* a SPOF. It's great you had a good
> experience with what sounds like a Vmotion move. The fact that DASD is NFS
> based really doesn't not give me great encouragement for MySQL
>  performance... which drupal already does it's best to kill.
>
>
> > As for showing work, while I feel I have shown what I can do, this is
> obviously not quite enough yet.
>
> Dan, my statement wasn't a slam against any one person. I just want
> someone to post a message like "Hey, I rebuilt the CLUE website using
> $MY_FAVORITE_CMS and would like others to take a look and ideally provide
> some feedback. I think my solution is better than the existing because
> a)... b)... c)... d)..."
>
> > So I am not discounting any ideas here, I just want everyone to be on
> the same page on redundancy for a VPS provider (a good one, not the $5 FSCK
> VPS services out there).
>
> The idea of having multiple people "running" the clue site from their
> personal machines has some real appeal to me. It's an interesting technical
> "problem" I'd like work on solving. The "downside" to drupal from this
> perspective means I ( and/or others ) will have to go in and rewrite the
> MySQL layer yet again. :( Did that once, it sucked; I can't imagine it's
> gotten any better in later releases.
>
> > I will be working on the Drupal site because everyone wants results,
> including me.  Work has been done to get things setup, so the first step is
> complete.  I have verbal promises that I will get the Drupal 7 work sent to
> me and that will help accelerate this.  I invite anyone who would like to
> also contribute to let me know so I can setup an account and I won't be
> blocking your ability to work.
>
> I am much more interested in the backend than the CMS. Other than offering
> to speak if I am in town at the same time a meeting is happening, I foresee
> myself as being a consumer of content, not a contributor. Now optimizing
> LAMP is interesting to me, so if you are offering ssh access with limited
> sudo rights, then I would be very interested.
>
> Raymond
>
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