Starr
1-20-03, 01:44 PM
From the desk of James Moser CTO
Logs: Logs are no longer configured for each apache virtual host, they are all sent to a piped program, one for access and one for error.
These programs parse the log and write them to each customer's access and error logs in *almost* real time. Customers shouldn't notice little if any change. You can even tail their access_log and error_log.
These programs also track bandwidth usage more accurately. This change frees up memory from each httpd process, and is a big step towards hosting sites on multiple servers (allowing for even more redundancy and bring us that much closer to a “4.9s” SLA).
Log rotation has not been affected yet, however I believe in the next couple off days I'm going to start rotating logs on a daily basis. Customers will still have access to the previous week's log files by day, something like "access_log.Mon.zip" and "access_log.Tue.zip", ECT. There also are no more ssl_access_log and ssl_error_log. They are combined with the normal access and error logs.
One of the things we are adding to our network is an SSL Accelerator and Content Switch. They would not be able to provide the separate log files anyway, because all the requests would be normal requests to Apache.
Apache: I have upgraded apache's mod_ssl to the newest version, 2.8.12 on all our web servers. I have also added mod_dosevasive which helps prevent dos attacks on our servers.
MySQL: I have installed mysql 4.0.7- on two of our servers and haven't had a problem with it. If I install it on all our servers it should help us resource wise in many ways because it implements better indexes and also has user limits we can setup so we can prevent people from seriously abusing mysql (thus protecting other customers).
MySQL 4 also has row level locking and other things that will make the mysql server run more efficiently. I'm going to install it on a working devel machine first for testing, then on our main db server as that will help our databases tremendously.
FreeBSD 5.0: FreeBSD 5.0 was released today!!! (I’m so excited!!) I've been using it on my desktop for a while now and now that its "stable" we can install it on our web servers. FreeBSD 5.0 has huge performance increases over 4.x on multi-processor machines. It also has a number of features that are significant; though I don't know how much of the other changes will help our servers. I'm going to install it on one of our web servers and see how many changes I will have to make first. There are a lot of changes, one important one being FreeBSD 5.0 no longer has perl included in its base installation.
With mySQL 4 and FreeBSD 5, the only other huge change software wise we will eventually be considering is the migration to Apache2, but we won't do that for some time now because there is no way we can use FrontPage with it along with a number of other things.
Stay tuned as we continue to develope, build and maintain the perfect hosting solution. :)
Logs: Logs are no longer configured for each apache virtual host, they are all sent to a piped program, one for access and one for error.
These programs parse the log and write them to each customer's access and error logs in *almost* real time. Customers shouldn't notice little if any change. You can even tail their access_log and error_log.
These programs also track bandwidth usage more accurately. This change frees up memory from each httpd process, and is a big step towards hosting sites on multiple servers (allowing for even more redundancy and bring us that much closer to a “4.9s” SLA).
Log rotation has not been affected yet, however I believe in the next couple off days I'm going to start rotating logs on a daily basis. Customers will still have access to the previous week's log files by day, something like "access_log.Mon.zip" and "access_log.Tue.zip", ECT. There also are no more ssl_access_log and ssl_error_log. They are combined with the normal access and error logs.
One of the things we are adding to our network is an SSL Accelerator and Content Switch. They would not be able to provide the separate log files anyway, because all the requests would be normal requests to Apache.
Apache: I have upgraded apache's mod_ssl to the newest version, 2.8.12 on all our web servers. I have also added mod_dosevasive which helps prevent dos attacks on our servers.
MySQL: I have installed mysql 4.0.7- on two of our servers and haven't had a problem with it. If I install it on all our servers it should help us resource wise in many ways because it implements better indexes and also has user limits we can setup so we can prevent people from seriously abusing mysql (thus protecting other customers).
MySQL 4 also has row level locking and other things that will make the mysql server run more efficiently. I'm going to install it on a working devel machine first for testing, then on our main db server as that will help our databases tremendously.
FreeBSD 5.0: FreeBSD 5.0 was released today!!! (I’m so excited!!) I've been using it on my desktop for a while now and now that its "stable" we can install it on our web servers. FreeBSD 5.0 has huge performance increases over 4.x on multi-processor machines. It also has a number of features that are significant; though I don't know how much of the other changes will help our servers. I'm going to install it on one of our web servers and see how many changes I will have to make first. There are a lot of changes, one important one being FreeBSD 5.0 no longer has perl included in its base installation.
With mySQL 4 and FreeBSD 5, the only other huge change software wise we will eventually be considering is the migration to Apache2, but we won't do that for some time now because there is no way we can use FrontPage with it along with a number of other things.
Stay tuned as we continue to develope, build and maintain the perfect hosting solution. :)