Last monday we upgraded our core database server after a power outage knocked the site offline. I haven’t touched this machine since 2005 so it was a major undertaking to do it last minute. We upgraded from a machine with 64 GB of ram and 8 CPU’s to a HP ProLiant DL785 with 512 GB of ram and 32 CPU’s and moved from SQLserver 2005 to 2008 and windows 2008. The new SQL Server is far more powerful, on the previous server when we passed 130,000 concurrent users replication would fall behind dramatically for no reason.
We also made several major changes to the site.
1. Introduction of themes, you can use 5,000 activity points to ad themes to your profile or you can buy a serious membership and get it that way. Even if your membership expires you still get to keep them.
2. I introduced a feature called date night. Every week starting at friday 2pm PST you can signal to the community you are free for a date on the following friday night , serious members will get displayed first followed by everyone else. The next friday the list gets cleared and people can add themselves to the list and signal they are free for a date for the following friday.
3. Launched a new flash uploader where you can rotate, resize and crop your thumbnails.
In the next week we will be upgrading our image serving, we are nearing 10,000 images served per second and existing stuff just isn’t cutting it. We will be moving our 200 million images over to RamSan… Hopefully when all this is done I won’t need to do anything till the site doubles or triples in size again!
June 14, 2009 at 11:18 pm |
Ever consider what happens when you outpace all the other sites that actually pay you for hits? You may have to start linking to non-date sites…
June 15, 2009 at 7:20 am |
I’m curious to know what kind of hardware supports 512GB of ram and 32 CPU’s (do you mean 32 cores?). Care to share what hardware you are using?
June 15, 2009 at 3:23 pm |
I think he purchased the HP 9000 superdome, you can find them new and used (refurbished). Pricey but its a super server : )
June 15, 2009 at 5:39 pm
That box runs HP/UX – but Marcus is using Windows and MSSQL
June 15, 2009 at 7:51 am |
Happy to hear the switch and upgrade went well. For the thumbnail editor is this being done locally or server side and did use off the shelf or do something custom, I’ve been wondering when we would see this since a few months back with the post about image editing options
June 15, 2009 at 8:31 pm |
I think it was a new HP that just came out. Most of the higher end servers have 256 or 512 GB of ram from dell or hp.
June 16, 2009 at 5:37 am |
Had a look at the HP website. Best I could find was the Proliant DL580 G5 which takes a max of 256GB of memory and 4 six-core Xeons (24 cores in total).
June 16, 2009 at 5:43 am
Ah, Ok, i’ve found it – the Superdone 32P and 64P – those are big beasts.
June 16, 2009 at 7:53 pm |
how much did the HP superdome run markus? do you care sharing the details of your architecture?
HP Superdome (32 Cores/512GB Ram)
Ramsan 620 Flash SSD
Foundry ServerIron Balancer
Akamai CDN
Memcached
June 16, 2009 at 8:44 pm |
HP ProLiant DL785, never heard of a superdome till someone mentioned it on here. I don’t use memecache, no point in caching anything as everything is updated so often.
June 16, 2009 at 9:56 pm |
You get these?
June 17, 2009 at 7:16 am |
Nice box. So you are running 8 four core Opterons – total of 32 cores and 512GB of memory. Total system price around $115k (according to the HP website) – that is assuming you just have CPU’s and Memory – no drives. I’m sure it will pay off in no time
June 25, 2009 at 6:58 pm |
[...] relevant to us because we’re on the Microsoft stack, too. I was intrigued when Markus posted this recent update: Last monday we upgraded our core database server after a power outage knocked the site offline. I [...]
August 6, 2009 at 7:09 am |
[...] relevant to us because we’re on the Microsoft stack, too. I was intrigued when Markus posted this recent update: Last monday we upgraded our core database server after a power outage knocked the site offline. I [...]
April 30, 2010 at 12:40 pm |
Hey Marcus what are you doing about the serial killer on your fish site that has been killing women. How is it that its not all over the place yet. Your system sucks and it can not stay free forever. You will be forced to charge a fee to stop these maniacs from killing again. I recommend a paid service. Marcus is only init for the money the ads provide for him. I have met marcus in person years back and he really needs to do something before he finds himself in a bad place.
May 31, 2010 at 3:41 pm |
Looking for your new post
October 28, 2010 at 11:06 pm |
Visit http://www.baladoros.com, news about PAOK, Aris, Iraklis, Olympiakos, Panathinaikos, AEK. Betting news, live scores, gossip.
January 9, 2011 at 2:46 am |
[...] and an email server. All quite powerful machines.More reads right on the POF owner's blog:- http://plentyoffish.wordpress.co…Jeff Atwood had a good article about scalling out vs. scalling up, having POF as an example: [...]
March 12, 2011 at 11:11 pm |
I think themes are great.
April 9, 2011 at 10:02 pm |
I think new themes are doing great.
June 24, 2011 at 10:43 am |
[...] out cluster so even if it’s more expensive scale up works better for his needs. Update 3: POF now has 200 million images and serves 10,000 images served per second. They’ll be moving to a 250,000 IOPS RamSan to [...]
June 28, 2011 at 6:44 am |
[...] out cluster so even if it’s more expensive scale up works better for his needs. Update 3: POF now has 200 million images and serves 10,000 images served per second. They’ll be moving to a 250,000 IOPS RamSan to [...]
July 8, 2011 at 6:47 pm |
Flash uploader is good feature
September 6, 2012 at 12:28 pm |
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December 21, 2012 at 1:18 pm |
I think POF is a great dating website.
January 30, 2013 at 6:36 am |
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