Server Bliss
Entry posted by Binkmeister
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Binky so happy with the server.
As you may recall, last month I found a way to optimize the BZPower database, and the site's been running much more smoothly since then. Our hits have been up, and the weekends have been stellar, with nearly 3 million hits a day during weekends in September. I've seen more than 500 people online at once, with the server behaving itself. After literally years of futzing around with the settings, it's truly gratifying that I've finally stumbled onto the right solution to make the site run smoothly and more reliably.
One thing I noticed was that when the Voya Nui Online game was announced as being online, our hits decreased substantially. The last two days have seen marked decreases in bandwidth and hits, but the visits have stayed steady. That means the same number of people are coming to BZP, but they're not doing as much. I strongly suspect it's because everyone's headed over to play VNOLG. It's also certainly obvious by the web logs that school's back in!
I can't overstate how much of a relief the server stability is to me. After all the false starts and "Gosh, I think this'll do it..." tweaks that didn't work, I was nearly ready to give up. Nobody knows the dozens - maybe hundreds - of hours I spent wading through technical manuals over the years, trying to figure the best optimization... so if you sent me an email or PM that didn't get answered, that may be why.
At any rate, it's been a month and we're still humming along. The only glitches have been when we've turned BS01 back on, and something on that site sucked up massive amounts of server resources, effectively blocking BZP for up to an hour at a time. (BS01 is hosted by BZP on the same machine.) There are plans in place to alleviate that issue also, but in the meantime BS01 is currently offline.
So for now... smooooooooth sailing on BZP like you've never seen.
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