Matthew's Server

From WikiForAll

This wiki runs off Matthew's server. This article gives a bit of background about it.

Contents 1 The History 2 Software 3 Average CPU Usage 4 Total Number of Server Processes 5 Root Password 6 Slowness

The History

Not much to say here, really...

This server was around about halfway through 2006 (iirc) and had a couple of pages on it that were useful at school. Real progress was made with "Nerds Gone Wild", an attempt at a collaborative project that would allow us all to connect and put "episodes" of our lives online. Needless to say, it didn't work out. It took far too long to make and ended up a mess.

After that the server became less popular, used only for the bare necessities. At this point in time, it was running under Windows and was hence not the fastest server in the world.

Until September 2007, when Matthew decided he wanted to learn about wikis and set one up on his server. Within hours of playing with the features and fiddling with skins and such, he realized just how much the rest of the group would enjoy this. By giving the link to James, the wiki admin team was created and content added.

On the 22nd of October 2007, Matthew switched his system from Windows to Linux. This caused the wiki to go offline until Wednesday evening where he restored the wiki to its previous state in under an hour. Since this time the wiki has run with more stability and works faster.

And then, on the 27th of October, the planned release date, Matthew made changes to the configuration to improve page sizes by 30% and serve speeds by 40%.

Software

The server runs a LAMP system, with Apache 2.2.3, PHP 5.2.1 and mySQL 5.0. It runs in Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) which is running under VMWare Server on a Windows XP box (we don't have enough money to buy a dedicated box :().

It also runs Postfix and Courier for the mail server SMTP and POP3/IMAP capabilities.

Average CPU Usage

So far (before people really start using it) the CPU averages out at about 10% max when a person accesses a page (partially due to compression we put on pages to reduce bandwidth and make pages load faster). Out of the 256 MB of memory (and 7 GB of swap) we're only using at most 230 MB of physical RAM and at most 60 MB of swap, which isn't all that bad. This usage has something to do with the fact that we run 112 processes on the server (half of which are probably useless anyway) and that the web server processes use up memory fast.

Total Number of Server Processes

Each server process is designed to support at least one client.

It starts off with 15 processes, with between 10 and 30 processes spare. The server will support a maximum of 150 clients.

Each process supports a maximum of 512 clients.

Multiple processes mean more clients can access data at once.

Root Password

Haha, had you going there for a second, didn't I?

Slowness

You might notice the wiki going slow sometimes. This could be because 30 people just tried accessing the same page at once, in which case you should consider getting counselling because no page is that popular yet, or that the server is being used. It's running in an emulator (so any hacking is kinda useless) so it's speed is dependent on the host.

It might also be the host (not the emulator) doing a virus scan, which as we all know nerfs any usability. That happens at 8 am (GMT+10) every day, and lasts at worst 2 hours. Sorry, but if you want to donate some cash so we can get a real box to use for the server, go ahead.

I also just installed nethack on it, so that might be another reason for slowness.