I’m probably going to pull the trigger on the anticipated server upgrade soon, definitely before Super Tuesday and a good month earlier than I was expecting. This is our server load for the Nevada debate:
Anything over 2 (currently) means the system is at full capacity, and this graph is actually pretty fine since hitting the peak once in awhile really isn’t a big deal so long as you don’t stay there. But this is also the hardest we’ve ever hit the server over a sustained period and performance issues were noticed.
Since there was an upgrade planned soon-ish anyway for other reasons, and since I doubt traffic is going to decrease as primary season heats up, I figure we might as well do it now.
We were pushing out about 40 page views a minute during peak debate.
No, that’s just a speculative lark by me. However, the unstuckpolitics.com domain is up for renewal at the end of this month so we should probably coordinate with @simplicitus about that.
I expect we’ll probably need to temporarily upgrade hosting to deal with election traffic, for however long election traffic lasts (dear god it’s going to be months). The only option is going to be doubling the CPU’s and doubling memory, which doubles the price to $80/month. Thankfully we can roll that back as soon as traffic dies down due to Erik Prince’s secret police throwing us all in gulags a decisive Biden win quickly retruning the whole world to normalcy.
Rather than pull the trigger too soon on that and incurring unnecessary costs, I think we should wait until we obviously need to do it. So I’m proposing we should let the first debate happen with our current setup and see how it goes. That may mean slightly wonky forum behavior this coming Tuesday if we hit the server too hard. I’m really not sure how hard is too hard with our current setup, or how active the forum will be for the debates.
Not really related, but we will need to upgrade disk space at some point, maybe January-ish? We’re currently using 69% of 160 GB, and that grows by about 1% per week. We need some headroom there for maintenance stuff, so that should probably happen somewhere around 85% usage. We can add 100 GB blocks for $10/month.
@spidercrab because I know he likes to be @'ed for this stuff.
I don’t mind waiting and seeing how the first debate goes, but I strongly believe that some of the biggest value of this site comes from live events. So if the site gets stressed with the first debate, I think we should upgrade immediately with the expectation to dial it back in December or January. Or maybe February, depending on what we think Inauguration day is going to look like.
I think people have had reasonable questions about what we’re building up a balance of funds for, and increasing spending on hosting and disk space seems like a reasonable thing to do.
