Development roundup: November 2020

Hi everyone,

First of all, welcome to all the new Patrons who joined over the last few weeks. And returning patrons, thanks for your continued support. 

If you haven't already, connect your Patreon account to your site and Discord accounts to claim your benefits.

Site and Server happenings

This month, I have a shorter update for you, but I didn't want to wait for the year end to share it. I have been crunching at my day job, and have not spent much time on improving site functionality. (Yes, I promise the comment functionality will get the attention you crave.)

However, that's not to say I've been idle this month. If you recall the summer dev roundup, I mentioned issues with the storage platform. The EU storage server we moved to, is a much more expensive monthly investment, and as such, I decided it was necessary to look for cost-effective alternatives. Enter the new EU1 server (topmost):

An older model HP server, this has the same capabilities and capacity as the expensive EU0 server, albeit with slower disks. It was a relatively small investment that will likely pay for itself within a few months of operation. The server is located in the same datacenter as the other EU servers, so the main differentiating factor influencing your download is the disk speed. My brother spent a lot of his spare time to help me get this server installed in the rack and configured for use. Shout-out to him! 

The risk of buying older, used server hardware is that hardware issues can be a bit more common. These HP Proliant Gen8 servers are definitely getting up there in age, and as such, defects are more likely to crop up. These devices are meant to run 24/7 after all, and often have in their previous life. In the first two weeks, there were some issues with the RAM, which we resolved by replacing some of the memory banks. One of the HDDs was close to failure too, so I made the choice to get a replacement, and some spares, so we don't get caught with our pants down if another drive breaks. 

This is also the first time we've had site infrastructure run on hardware that we manage and control ourselves, rather than renting dedicated or virtualized hardware from an external party. This brings its own set of challenges in management, that I'm looking forward to tackle head-on.

On a related note, the new status page is looking very good, and the site has been much more stable over the last two months.

Go forth and leech

Both servers are currently enabled for anyone to download from, primarily so I can monitor stability and performance in the first few weeks. Early next year I hope to have a good impression of the performance difference, and will decide to either get rid of the faster, expensive server or make the faster server exclusive to Patrons. (that's you!)

So, if you are going to download something new from the site, and you live in the EU, make sure you give the new server a spin and let me know how it is.

And again, thanks for your support! Please let me know if you have any questions or feedback.

Kind regards,

Ganonmaster