The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

As long time members know, we are only a few weeks from out annual fund raising drive to fund our web server. Last year we needed to raise about $1100 as we needed to move up to a larger server. I think everyone will agree that things are much snappier on the forum and the web site.

Linode has recently announced that there are moving from the XEN hypervisor to the KVM hypervisor and upgrading their hardware for the KVM machines. Reportedly (both from Linode's announcement and from people who have already converted to KVM on Linode), this means a 20% to 25% improvement in processing power (both from KVM's much lower overhead and from the more powerful hardware). I will be converting our VPS to KVM sometime this week (or I hope to have time to do this). If we do get a 20%-25% increase, this will means I can move us back to the smaller and less expensive server size we used to use.

While this would mean some down time (probably 2-3 hours twice) over the next few weeks, such a move would mean we would only need to raise $750 to $800 (depending on how many domain renewals will come up over the next year) instead of $1100 -- a savings of $300 to $350. Please keep you fingers crossed that we see the improvement that others are seeing from switching to KVM, as if we do that's a hefty reduction in the amount of money we'd need to raise in our upcoming annual fund drive.

That would be now -- or whenever our turn comes up in the conversion queue.

That was fast. We are back up on KVM. The Mux is back up. Even the annoying security server for the Flash Mux client restarted on the second attempt. I keep waiting for something to go wrong.

Nothing has. It looks like this is working and seems fast enough that I will try downgrading us to our old server size sometime this week (when I have time which I can't predict).

I apologize for the lack of warning, but my afternoon project fell through and there is are zero servers in the server move queue, so I'm going to go ahead and try moving to that smaller server.  WE should be back up later this afternoon. Perhaps only 30 minutes, perhaps 60 to 120.

About 90 minutes. Longer than I had hoped, but everything including the MUX and it Flash Client's security server is up and running.

And everything seems to be working just as well and about as fast as before (even under a ridiculously high sever load from a overactive searchbot). It looks like we will be staying with the smaller server and saving about $300 a year on server costs!