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Slashdot.org News

Welcome To The New Slashdot Server 182

Posted by CmdrTaco from the HELLO-MY-NAME-IS-BRAK dept.
After much blood, sweat and tears, the new server appears to be up. It'll probably be a few hours yet while the DNS trickles over. We'll have a more extensive report describing the new hardware in the next couple of days... but first, we gotta iron out any kinks that pop up.
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Welcome To The New Slashdot Server More

Welcome To The New Slashdot Server

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  • Congrats and thanks, /. crew. You have made my cable modem very, very happy!

    John

  • Something's not quite right ... (Score:4)

    by IntelliTubbie ( 29947 ) on Tuesday May 09, 2000 @07:31PM (#1861250)
    There's something not quite right about viewing Slashdot on a fast server ... sort of like listening to old Beatles LPs on mp3, or seeing the Blair Witch Project in THX.
  • I was curious as to how well this new server would stand up to the traffic .. it appears to be about as fast as beta was, which is a SUBSTANTIAL improvement in refresh time. Yes, believe me, I noticed.

    Now I don't have to minimize Netscape and go back to work whenever I click onto a Slashdot page .. and come back minutes later to find it still loading ..
  • Here is some of what you ask
    http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=preview&bid=upti me

  • WOW (Score:1)

    by dan5691 ( 142649 )
    Almost as fast as when I first started reading way back when. Great Job.
  • I'd like to say thanks and great job on another successful upgrade. I can feel the difference already. Morning surfing is quite improved. Keep up the good work, and don't let the trolls get you down, you guys are awesome. On a separate note, if I had that much hardware, I'd be the happiest son of a bitch in the world :-)
  • ..."KICK ASS!"

    It looks just the way I left it, only FASTER! :-B

    Seriously, great job. If I didn't know you guys switched, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference.


    --
    Star Trek vs Star Wars. [furryconflict.com]
  • Search the archive for stories in the "Slashdot.org" category... You'll find quite a bit of slashdot ancient history. :)

    --
  • I have a python script that pulls the titles and urls and when the new server came online my old script quit working . Well it didn't take much to fix it but if you have scripts out there you may want to check them.
  • we're trying to plan for 0 downtime, hope we pull it off as well as you all did

    There was a bit of downtime, at least a second. /. was down like two hours ago...

    Tee hee, but anyway, a couple minutes of downtime is good... :-)

  • Just out of curiousity. What hardware was the old slashdot running under?

    And, what were the biggest reasons for upgrading?
    -Needed Faster CPU?
    -Needed more memory?
    -Needed a bigger network pipe?
    -Needed clustering?
    -___ ?
  • I thought something was wrong when it was responding
    in less than 30 seconds this morning.
    Now most clicks are in a second or two.



  • You guys are probably sick of hearing about the kinks, but in case you value our bug reports..

    The brunching shuttlecock slashbox is showing really outdated material

    But anyway, things are moving fast!!! I am impressed! Great job guys, here's a toast to another 3000000000 billion served!
  • No! This server is MINE! Get off.
  • how many people out there realize the amount of work that goes into not being able to notice any differences?

    Believe me I noticed the difference.... And it is *very* much appreciated.

    Bingo. The main page loaded on my machine much faster. Almost nil transfer time. Much nicer than the old delay (which occationally took so long my browser eventually gave up and reported the server as down).

    Good job guys. I hope the post transfer fixes go smoothly. :)
  • Yes, it even scrolls faster now.

  • On my homepage (check it out!) i've made
    a xml parser in php3 that parses the slashdot.xml into a more readable form. The thing is - and I don't know it's because of the new server, but yesterday, you (slashdot.org) stopped to put absolute url's into the or whatever the right xml-tag is. I know can just change my php3 parser - but I wanted to check if it is going to stay that way forever? pls comment.
    Regards -larsw-
    --------------------------
    Lars Wilhelmsen
    Buskerud College
    Faculty of Engineering
    Department of Computer Science
  • Oi! My fvourite useless poll doesn't load... get up lay bum's! 8]
  • Posted by BSD-Pat:

    We had an article on the beta a while back but:

    arrowpoint CS series load balancer...

    100 mbit pipe

    cisco 6509/2 MSFC's

    4 pIII650 web servers
    2 pIII650 image servers

    1 Dual pIII650 slashd

    1 Quad xeon 550 DB server

    the OS's are Linux 2.2.14 (Debian and RedHat)

    the servers I think are apache 1.3.12+mod_perl

  • Re:It works! (Score:3)

    by tweder ( 22759 ) <stwede@gmai l . c om> on Tuesday May 09, 2000 @07:34PM (#1861268) Homepage
    Umm, you might be checking the _old_ slashdot on Netcraft. I got these results.

    64.28.67.48 is running Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) mod_perl/1.22 on Linux
  • Now I can block Jon Katz articles even faster!
  • Iay ownay histencray ouyay 'lashdotsay'!

    Uoyay aymay ownay isskay hetay erversay! ;)

    ..... Enjoy your sleep dudes! :)


    "How much truth can advertising buy?" - iNsuRge [insurge.com.au] - AK47
  • Got the espresso maker handy? How about the convienient 5 pack of microwavable popping corn?

    Or are you guys lucky enough to have a a a a *looks around* Vending Machine!!

    Remember! Don't turn the old box into scrap just yet! Been there, done that, wasn't pretty.

    Congrats on a sucessful implementation! Place a little check in the box beside "Successful" on the change management form!

  • FAST (Score:1)

    by zinger ( 66947 )
    Nice and fast, you guys are getting way too popular.
  • Hey, /. loads faster than i have ever seen!!!

    Great job, folks!

    I got used to doing other things while waiting for pages to load- no more. Hee Haw!

    Right on,
    Sleen

  • I think I've noticed something new here...

    The stories I submitted to /. are now "rejected" instead of "declined". That's a great boost to my self esteem :-p
  • the submit button is still WAY TOO CLOSE to the preview button... :)

    [root@whatever /root]# traceroute slashdot.org
    traceroute to slashdot.org (64.28.67.48), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
    1 gogo-01.iinet.net.au (203.59.24.161) 115.602 ms 119.067 ms 129.663 ms
    2 qv2.west.net.au (203.59.24.243) 109.470 ms 119.229 ms 109.697 ms
    3 atm2-0-20.mb1.optus.net.au (202.139.0.177) 329.339 ms 439.238 ms 329.521 ms
    4 atm5-0-0-28.ia3.optus.net.au (192.65.89.201) 169.322 ms 169.236 ms 169.66 2 ms
    5 GigaEth1-0-0.rr1.optus.net.au (202.139.1.193) 189.402 ms 179.232 ms 159.5 72 ms
    6 hssi11-0-0.sf1.optus.net.au (192.65.89.234) 579.335 ms hssi4-0-0.sf1.optus. net.au (192.65.89.230) 639.251 ms 649.220 ms
    7 acr2-serial2-2-0-0.SanFranciscosfd.cw.net (206.24.209.205) 609.317 ms 589. 152 ms 609.658 ms
    8 corerouter2.SanFrancisco.cw.net (204.70.9.132) 659.171 ms 669.157 ms 639. 516 ms
    9 core6.SanFrancisco.cw.net (204.70.4.89) 579.316 ms 569.202 ms 609.514 ms 10 ibr01-s5-4.sntc02.exodus.net (209.185.9.9) 609.314 ms 609.202 ms 579.453 ms
    11 bbr01-g3-0.sntc02.exodus.net (216.33.154.131) 579.295 ms 609.189 ms 609.4 85 ms
    12 bbr02-p3-0.sntc04.exodus.net (209.1.169.254) 609.327 ms * 609.703 ms 13 bbr02-p3-0.okbr01.exodus.net (216.32.132.149) 659.289 ms 629.204 ms 659.6 69 ms
    14 * * bbr01-p5-0.wlhm01.exodus.net (216.32.132.210) 779.611 ms 15 dcr03-g1-0.wlhm01.exodus.net (64.14.70.49) 608.970 ms 739.209 ms 689.519 ms
    16 64.14.80.154 (64.14.80.154) 749.304 ms * 739.683 ms
    17 64.28.66.203 (64.28.66.203) 839.268 ms * 799.689 ms
    18 * * *
    19 * * *
    20 *^C

  • More like:

    Fast site. Popular site. Good site. Pick one.

    Appropriate, I think.

  • Could we perhaps have pictures of the different generations of the slashdot.org hardware? I imagine the original was a personal PC, and the current generation is a wall of rack-mounts tended by operators in white lab-coats, in an assault-proof windowless building surrounded by barbed wire, angry dogs and security guards.

    When do we get pictures?

  • How long until they realize that the peecee platform just isn't up to it? How much will they spend on bizarro load balancing solutions to disguise the fact that the peecee platform just can't scale? If load balancing is used for reliability, that's fine. But it's not the solution for using an underpowered platform to begin with.

    The right setup for this would be something more like two Sun 420s serving pages and a 3500 for the DB/fileserver. And yes, they should be running Linux (with Solaris you'd need twice as many machines to compensate for the built-in Molasses [tm] feature).

  • may I sleep now?
  • In terms of performance, you'll find Zeus (http://www.zeus.com [zeus.com]) is considerably faster than Apache but is pretty close to a drop-in replacement for it. It costs real money, but the performance gains are almost certainly worth it for a high-traffic site like /.
  • I've had this problem for quite some time... haven't you noticed how we're continually reminded about Jon Katz's "recent" Hellmouth articles?

  • Yay! (Score:2)

    by dieman ( 4814 )
    Way to go, now I can reload slashdot even faster during the day. :)
  • thats informative? is this a /. bug?
  • how many people out there realize the amount of work that goes into not being able to notice any differences? how many more do not give any appreciation to the bump in speed?

    Welcome to the world of Information Technology my friend. The truth is that most users notice nothing and appreciate less. That is, until it goes wrong. Then the purveyors of the service get villified ....

    BTW, I am in the UK, and it does seem quicker to me. Well done.
  • Yes, it is.
  • Too bad cartoon network foolishes airs it at 10:00 on Sunday when it easily could be a primetime contender.

  • OT (Score:3)

    by Duxup ( 72775 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2000 @12:18AM (#1861287) Homepage
    *Joke*

    I would like to be the first to claim that Slashdot began to go bad when they went to this new server.
  • informative? or a bug?
  • Dude, no.

    Great author:Jon Katz::Natalie Portman:ASCII-porn Jackie Chan.

  • Exactly.
  • over 20 hops from me. wish exodus could get some better connections.

    -l
  • what are you doing with the old hardware? i know i'd be interested in taking it off your hands as a tax deductible donation.

  • wow that is fast... 45 seconds per page???? What kind of 14.4 modem do you have???? brockn@spammeanddiedeskmedia.com
  • Congrats to the Slashdot Team.

    I do understand the blood sweat and tears that go into upgrading a network server without interfering with the endusers.

    Thanks for all you hard work..

    S.

    Scott
    C{E,F,O,T}O
    sboss dot net
    email: scott@sboss.net
    I am 39.0% slashdot pure

  • There is plenty of room to play with the dietary suplements for the hamsters. However, within 18 months it will be necessary to consider upgrading to trained rats. Then again microsoft.com gets suprising performance using large quantities of bugs. There is also a rumor that Big Blue has an interesting multiplying server project under development using rabbits.

  • Great job guys!
  • how many people out there realize the amount of work that goes into not being able to notice any differences?

    how many more do not give any appreciation to the bump in speed?

    I do, notice something and the difference is faster, faster, harder ... oops! Yeah, now I can turn off the "light" bit and see /. in color. Who said this is not the cool age. -d

  • Hmph, I am really liking the name. The server was what Hanson wanted, and its what Hanson got! Yeay! Space Ghost's lucky guest star next week: Rob Malda. Don't forget to tune in [ghostplanet.com]!
  • Good Job!

    This feels like as much of a speed increase as when you moved /. off of that shared Alpha onto it's own system!
    --
  • god i hate windows... stupid school computers... while i was typing, the side of my palm ran into the extended key that makes the right-click menu come up... musta hit an 'r', cause the page reloaded halfway thru the message... *grumbles*
    anyways, i don't think that there really is any new hardware... the people at /. are just making it up... i don't feel a difference... neither do a lot of people... therefore, there was no upgrade, the staff at /. are trying to dupe us...
    which makes me wonder what the real hardware is... 50 beowulfed palms? it'd explain how slow the slashcode gets updated... (coding in graffiti can't be fun...)
    maybe i should do that at my site, if anyone ever complains about speed... tell them that i'm working on it, and a month later, take the site down for a day, and say that i've upgraded the hardware... they'll think its faster (maybe i'll take my d.net client down for a day... tho its pretty good at staying out of the way...), so they'll be happy, and my pocketbook'll be happy... well, no, that's not true... my pocketbook is NEVER happy... happier, i guess... i actually don't think that /. gets hit as much as people say... i don't think any of you exist, actually... well, maybe one or two... no trolls ever go to slashdot... there's just a script that writes troll posts... and another one that moderates the other script's postings down... how else would trolls get first posts? maybe i'm a script... i'm confused...
  • no, t1
    my point was, /. was so backed up last week, it was taking that long to load an entire page.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Man, I fell for that. Some sort of mouse over would have kept me from figuring it out too.
  • you'll note that the IP his link looks up at netcraft is 207.46.130.149, which, although it has no reverse-DNS, is served from an ip for which dns4.cp.msft.net is athoritive.

    that's not slashdot :-) nice try though. On a hunch, I forward-looked up www.microsoft.com (hey, trolls aren't usually that creative) and it's one of the 4 servers in that DNS round-robin.
  • First of all, you need to do some research about what Apache does and doesn't cache.

    Second, mod_mmap doesn't put anything in the HEAD request, so if they were to take this simple and adequate route to caching, you wouldn't have a clue about it. mod_mmap is totally transparent to you, the user. It's not totally transparent to the sysadmins (one of it's weaknesses, IMHO) but then if you're only serving up 60 images, that shouldn't be a big deal.

    Finally though, I really think people make too big a deal about serving images off a separate server. Let's look at the bigger picture: Slashdot serves around a million page views a day. That's averaging out throughout the day at a whopping 11 requests/sec on page views. Now given that we've seen benchmarks of apache serving static content at 2000+ req/sec, I think it's probably not even breaking a sweat serving those images.

    What slashdot really needs to do (and I know pudge knows this too) is get away from Apache::Registry. That and do some serious code cleanups, and maybe even try this app on Oracle. That's where you'll see real differences, IMHO.

    Anyway, I suppose they say every little helps, so how about it Pudge? Is mod_mmap doing it's thang in there?
  • if you're going to do brak, do it right, bitch:

    One time I hired a monkey to take notes for me in class. I would just sit there with my mind a complete blank while the monkey scribbled on little pieces of paper. At the end of the week the teacher said, "Class, I want you to write a paper using your notes." So I wrote a paper that said "Hello, my name is Bingo. I like to climb on things. Can I have a banana? Eek eek." I got an F. When I told my Mom about it she said "I told you never trust a monkey!" The end.

    thats the way its done, jabroni. brak smells what you're cooking!!!

  • Play with image caducity (Score:3)

    by Pseudonymus Bosch ( 3479 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2000 @12:39AM (#1861307) Homepage
    I read somewhere a trick to reduce the load on your Apache:
    Set the caducity (word? I mean the time after it is no longer valid) to a date in the future (say after 1 month) for constant images.
    Thus, people will cache (locally o proxily) the images and they won't request them from your browser, and images are a lot of bytes per file.

    Of course, this is for constant images (formatting pixels, topics,...) not for banner ads, counters and doubleclick bigbrothers.
    __
  • Wow, it is nice to have seen Slashdot grow and grow and become much cooler every month since it's inception as Fish 'n' Chips! (You hardcore slashdotters remember that?)

    • The newer server is pretty fast for more or less. The old one it just moved from (was it still that old alpha?) was fast enough.
    • If memory serves me right, when slashdot.org first started, it was it's own machine, but not the alpha yet - this was fast enough as this was right before the bandwith bottleneck hadn't yet occurred, as there wasn't hundreds of thousands of hits/day as just quite yet.
    • Fish 'n' Chips was mightily fast as there was an article or two about every day (primarily window manager and linux release anouncements) - boy I remember one time there hadn't been an article posted in three days and I started to think maybe he had discontinued it. Then again, I just installed junkbuster [junkbusters.com] again, so typically everything is faster all around.


    Way to go Rob! (Even though at times I don't fully agree on your opinions at times - but hey, you are an enlightened child, as we worship the same deity [petetownshend.com] - I look forward to slashdotting everyday)

    P.S.,
    Rob if you ever read this, on your personal homepage, in the windowmaker section, it hasn't been updated in about 2 years (The "Your'e Early" splash is there - I gave up waiting for an update on that one about a year ago, heh, I always figured you'd make an uber cool windowmaker section).
  • i prefer:

    Fast
    Good
    Cheap.

    Pick Two

  • Hmm (Score:1)

    by shadow ( 9235 )
    I know of only one way to respond to this: w00t!
  • The good news is that response is definitely faster. The bad news (perhaps) is that this may be due to my being online at 5:50 EDT, when all the good little geeks who don't have to go to the airport this morning are still in bed. I'll try it later this morning, after the country wakes up.

    However, loading a large text page (like this one) is noticeably faster, as are the image loads. And the preview is really fast. I remember when you were talking about this at Geek Pride last month - Exodus is a good shop and for a /.-type site it's probably the best option for you. Good job.

    - -Josh Turiel
  • Hey, great speed, guys! I thought it was my ISP that was causing the lag before, but there's definitely an improvement in bandwidth after the server change.

    Only one little thing that I've noticed so far. If I search for an old story in the archives, find what I'm looking for and click on it, your server doesn't seem to care about my /. settings and displays the old story in default /. layout.

    Ok, so your old server did exactly the same, but I thought since you're already digging in there...

    Again, congrats on a new server. You're doing a brilliant job.
  • (yesterday, in cyberspace, at my favorite website...)



    [NRAdude@gtmi686dpp NRAdude]$ ping slashdot.org
    PING slashdot.org (64.28.67.48): 56 data bytes
    64 bytes from 64.28.67.48: icmp_seq=0 ttl=110 time=249.6 ms
    64 bytes from 64.28.67.48: icmp_seq=1 ttl=110 time=229.9 ms
    64 bytes from 64.28.67.48: icmp_seq=2 ttl=110 time=229.9 ms
    64 bytes from 64.28.67.48: icmp_seq=3 ttl=110 time=219.9 ms
    64 bytes from 64.28.67.48: icmp_seq=4 ttl=110 time=219.9 ms
    64 bytes from 64.28.67.48: icmp_seq=5 ttl=110 time=210.0 ms
    64 bytes from 64.28.67.48: icmp_seq=6 ttl=110 time=229.9 ms

    --- slashdot.org ping statistics ---
    7 packets transmitted, 7 packets received, 0% packet loss
    round-trip min/avg/max = 210.0/227.0/249.6 ms
    [NRAdude@gtmi686dpp NRAdude]$ queso slashdot.org
    dude! wow! fast and efficient! Nosebleed! They're using Linux kernel 2.2.x
    [NRAdude@gtmi686dpp NRAdude]$ logout











    (today, at night, about 3:00am, can't get on slashdot.org, GRRRRRRR)



    [NRAdude@gtmi686dpp NRAdude]$ ping slashdot.org
    PING slashdot.org (64.28.67.48): 56 data bytes
    64 bytes from 64.28.67.48: icmp_seq=6 ttl=110 time=666,666.666ms

    --- slashdot.org ping statistics ---
    666 packets transmitted, 1.666 packets received, 666% packet loss
    round-trip min/avg/max = 6666.66/6666.66/6666.66 ms
    [NRAdude@gtmi686dpp NRAdude]$ queso slashdot.org
    eeeek! They're using Windows 2000 pseudo smp mode. leave in the name of Jesus! SIG15. Core dumped.

    ...

    ...

    ...

    [NRAdude@gtmi686dpp NRAdude]$ smbmount \\slashdot.org\public -U PopeJohnPaul5 -I 64.28.67.48 -N -n TheExorcist -W slashdot.org -c mount /mnt/theposessed/public
    [NRAdude@gtmi686dpp NRAdude]$ mv /home/NRAdude/biblestudy/virtualobjectoriented/cru cifix.c /mnt/theposessed/public
    [NRAdude@gtmi686dpp NRAdude]$ killall samba;shutdown now;pray to god

  • Re:Image servers (caching) (Score:3)

    by JohnZed ( 20191 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2000 @01:10AM (#1861314)
    Right, I am aware of mod_mmap_static, but I think that it's highly overrated at this point. Most significantly, it's at version 0.04 and placed in the "experimental" modules section for a reason: it's not well tested.
    I think one of the reasons it's not well tested is that this is a pretty incovenient module to use. It makes you list every file to be mmapped, one-by-one, in the Apache config file. That's fine if you need it for, say, the slashbox icons, but it's going to be annoying to edit the server config files every time you want to add or remove a new banner ad.
    I also just figured that they wouldn't be using 1 GB of RAM and 10k RPM SCSI drives if they had no performance concerns. Or maybe /. just likes showing off. . . ;)
    --JRZ
  • Everyone slashdot Slashdot.org ;) Just kidding! Don't! NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  • So where's this new puppy located?


  • IntelliTubbie wrote:
    Now I can block Jon Katz articles even faster!
    Block who?
  • I think the title should be more alone the lines of:

    !(/.(/.))

    now if only "/." were a valid C/C++ var name :)-

    Chris C.
  • starting at cr1-hfc6.union1.nj.home.net:
    15 hops to get there can't help much either.
    I'm getting around 47 ms - but didn't hit that router - the Net must have adapted ...

  • Congrats, everyone -- the improvement is immediately noticeable and greatly appreciated!

    Imagine the frustration (and I'm sure you can) of sitting on a T1 connection and having to stick /. in the background while it loads ... eventually.

    I suppose we can safely assume it's not running IIS on an NT4 box ... :)



    ikaros, who has really got to get off his bum and get his own server set up ...
  • is there old slashcode in place? A while back, the term "declined" replaced the arguably harsher "rejected", when a story submission was turned down.

    It appears it now says "rejected" once again.

  • Was this upgrade the first step towards the MySQL replication Andover will be developing for Slashdot and Freshmeat?

    Or will there be another upgrade necessary to implement those changes when ready? We're looking at replication at work right now and it's much more work than just the database itself, so I would hope this upgrade has such future developments in mind. Just curious..

  • The new IP is 64.28.76.48 From where I am (Melbourne, Australia) this has a ping of approx. 800ms (ATM). This is in comparison to the old IP, which took around 1000ms, a saving of 20%! Good work, guys!
    -------------------------------------------

  • slashboxes (Score:4)

    by leiz ( 35205 ) <leiz@juno . c om> on Tuesday May 09, 2000 @08:07PM (#1861337)
    is it just me or are the slashboxes about one month behind?
    • security focus is taking about the Netpliance i-opener
    • hollywood bitchslap has a link to the review of keeping the faith
    • linux.com tuneup has some old tip bash history
    • geek in space is on "Mellow Trancey Version"
    btw, extrans (html tags to text) doesnt work (at least in preview mode) ... comments?


    Zetetic
    Seeking; proceeding by inquiry.

    Elench
    A specious but fallacious argument; a sophism.

  • Congrats on the upgrade. When's the upgrade? (Score:4)

    by IvyMike ( 178408 ) on Tuesday May 09, 2000 @08:08PM (#1861338)

    It's an axiom: when a web site is good AND fast, it attracts more and more viewers. There are no good fast web sites; there are only popular, good but slow websites. I expect Slashdot to be fast for about a month, at which point it will be slow as it ever was.

    At least a lot more people will be reading, though.

  • Oh, come one guys, Katz isn't that bad...he's a great author, even if he misses the finer technical points. The guy watches out for the geeks. Yet you spurn him.
  • No wonder it's running faster...
    64.28.67.48 [netcraft.com] is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000

  • History of Slashdot servers (Score:5)

    by Brighten ( 93641 ) on Tuesday May 09, 2000 @09:31PM (#1861346)
    It would be interesting to see a history of the boxes (and net connections) that have been used to serve Slashdot over the years, and when each was swapped out. Does such a thing exist?

    P.S. I'm definitely noticing a nice speed improvement... good work guys! :-)

  • It is?

    64.28.67.48 [netcraft.com] is running Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) mod_perl/1.22 on Linux

  • Re:Nice config, but why no OS switch? (Score:3)

    by Wellspring ( 111524 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2000 @02:41AM (#1861357)

    For the power and security a site like slashdot needs, I am surprised that they haven't switched to Microsoft Windows NT. The boys from Seattle have really done it this time: the all new version for 2000 is hard to beat! Security, stability, scalability, performance-- it's the whole package!

    I know it's tempting to go for one of those fly by night 'shareware' operating systems like LinusOS. But, come on now. Slashdot is a big, grown up site. We need NT! Besides, if they get enough business, maybe the Department of Justice won't close down the internet.

    Anyway, just another thought from cyberspace-- I'll sign off for now. Gotta get Outlook working again. I've been having trouble ever since I got that joke email-- hope it isn't a virus. If a virus can get past Windows security, can you imagine how many viruses infect LinusOS? I shudder to think.

  • warez? (Score:3)

    by pirodude ( 54707 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2000 @03:00AM (#1861360)
    So will this move make my downloading from warez.slashdot.org faster?

  • Image servers (Score:3)

    by JohnZed ( 20191 ) on Tuesday May 09, 2000 @08:28PM (#1861363)
    Oh no, looks like the two image servers are running Apache too. Sigh. I love Apache as much as the next guy, but its speed for static files is pretty bleak.
    I'd guess that these guys are serving a very limited set of files: the section images (say, 2 kb each * 60 or so images) + whatever handful of ads happen to be rotating at any given time (let's say 10 kb each * 25 active ads) + 100 kb for a few random images I forgot = 470 kb.
    Even if that's a wild under-estimate, it's still clear that all the active image content at any given time could fit in a tiny fraction of the server's RAM. Apache, however, doesn't cache static files without an add-on module. So, assuming /. isn't using such an add-on (since it reports no modules in its HEAD response), we're lead to assume that the server is actually going to the filesystem, loading the image into RAM, and then sending it out over the wire for every single request. Wow. Please, correct me if I'm wrong, becuase I hope slash isn't burning that many cycles. . .
    You might want to try SGI's QSC (quick shortcut cache), which is an Apache patch (not really a module) designed for SPECweb96, or phhttpd, which is quite similar, but a bit more general-purpose. You could certainly experiment with other web servers too, but I'm assuming it's simpler to administer apache across the board.
    Oh well, maybe I'm just missing some neat trick that /. is using in their new servers that doesn't show up on the radar. Anyone know for sure?
    --JRZ
  • Nice configuration [slashdot.org] there, and it seems to work nice too. Debian instead of FreeBSD might be a surprise, to someone who still doesn't get that VA is a Linux-only shop; but whatever.

    My question is, why the big deal ArrowPoint switch? That's a $15,000 unit, and it looks like all you are doing with it is firewalling and load balancing a 100Mbit pipe across 6 web servers. Sure seems to me another VA Debian box could do that for a whole lot less.

    Of course ArrowPoint is in the same building as Andover.net, and Exodus is a big ArrowPoint customer. But those aren't reasons to use an expensive, closed solution when an open one would do? Are they?

    No troll here, just curious.

    --Seen

  • Is the "new" version of Slashdot crashing the later nightly Mozilla builds for anyone else?

    I'm using build 2000050709; just trying at access http://www.slashdot.org/index.pl [slashdot.org] causes that mozilla build to silently crash. Interestingly enough, m15 (build 2000041811) won't load the new slashdot page at all; it just sits there, proclaiming the page is completely loaded, when the canvas is gray.

    Is anyone else seeing this?

    More importantly, is this just backlash for that last mozilla story [slashdot.org] from AOLTimeWarnerNetscapeICQNullSoft, or is this a Slashdot bug? ;-)

  • Aren't you aware that Linux uses any free RAM as disk cache? Now unless the new /. box gets /.ed it probably has some free RAM to cache all those cute little icons.
    ---
  • To log in, I had to set Netscape to accept cookies from anywhere (not just originating server), and I got redirected over to beta.slashdot.org. Methinks something still is a little funky.
  • Joke != troll

    Lighten up I figured most of the slashdot crowd would figure it out.
  • There was a recent articlehere , our friends at Andover.net are going to add this feature to MySQL because they need it for /. and [fm].

  • congrats (Score:3)

    by john_gault ( 115165 ) on Tuesday May 09, 2000 @07:10PM (#1861384)
    how many people out there realize the amount of work that goes into not being able to notice any differences?

    how many more do not give any appreciation to the bump in speed?

    humph. Stuff looks good so far guys. Congrats on getting the job right this far.

  • It is like a train, people only notice it, when it is late or uh de-railed.

    Shouts to the slashdot crew they are doing a killer job.
  • I'm a busy guy. I've been reading this site for a few years now, and I usually set my filtering at "2" and pick through just the stories that interest me, to rein in the total amount of time I spend slashdotting. While I'm often tempted to post a comment, I've only done it a couple of times. Maybe it's fear of flame, maybe it's laziness, maybe it's just because after reading *all* the other comments to avoid replicating ideas I become so confused that I forget what triggered my original impulse to post my own comment in the first place. So my slashdot karma is usually zero.

    While I appreciate that participation is rewarded in the form of moderator points, that system has a few drawbacks. My proposal is to let users select from among more than one moderation model (the one Rob gives us) on the slashdot preferences page. The preferred model for me would let every user (even lurkers like me) give a 1 (hated it), 2 (ehh, default, unrated), or 3 (loved it) rating to every comment they read, should they feel the impetus to click on the thumbs up or thumbs down button that appears below the comment. Comments could be sorted by the total accumulated points. This would permit other views, such as "top 10 hottest comments", as well as making us lurkers feel more welcome. Well?

  • Doh! (Score:2)

    by zCyl ( 14362 )
    What'd you do different? You broke the slashdot section of wmheadlines, now they're all pointing to local files...
  • Some seem to bee behind. However I believe I've seen that prob in the past too at one time or another.

  • Is the speed an illusion? (Score:3)

    by Strepsil ( 75641 ) <mike@bremensaki.com> on Tuesday May 09, 2000 @10:47PM (#1861412) Homepage
    Hey, it feels faster to me, but is that perhaps just because most people haven't caught up with the DNS changes and are going somewhere else? Have we lucky few just got a private slashdot server?

    I'll reserve judgement until normal load is restored. :)

    But hey - looks like a smooth changeover. Well done.

  • Slashdot.xml broken! (Score:3)

    by rent ( 66355 ) on Tuesday May 09, 2000 @10:49PM (#1861416) Homepage
    The data format of http://slashdot.org/slashdot.xml [slashdot.org] has been changed! It broke my slashdot headlines generating script, becuase the <url> tag does not have the full URL!!

    Please Fix..
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • That and stats on hits/sec, SQL requests/sec, blah blah...
  • Congratulations on moving Slashdot.org to the new server machines.

    The ultimate test will be later today, when at the middle of the day will Slashdot.org be able to keep up with the big demands from users. This was a BIG problem with Slashdot.org on weekdays, because in the middle of a weekday Slashdot.org often slowed to a deadly crawl. :-(

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