Status of DFly server storage upgrades

Last month we did some storage upgrades, particularly of internet-facing machines for package and OS distribution. Yesterday we did a number of additional upgrades, described below. All using funds generously donated by everyone! * The main repository server received a 2TB SSD to replace the HDDs it was using before. This will improve access to a number of things maintained by this server, including the mail archives, and gives the main repo server more breathing room for repository expansion. Space was at a premium before. Now there's plenty. * Monster, the quad socket opteron which we currently use as the database builder and repository that we export to our public grok service ( grok.dragonflybsd.org) received a 512G SSD to add swap space for swapcache, to help cache the grok meta-data. It now has 600GB of swapcache configured. Over the next few weeks we will also be changing the grok updates to ping-pong between the two 4TB data drives it received in the last upgrade so we can do concurrent updates and web accesses without them tripping over each other performance-wise. * The main developer box, Leaf, received a 2TB SSD and we are currently in the midst of migrating all the developer accounts in /home and /build from its old HDDs to its new SSD. This machine serves developer repos, developer web stuff, our home page and wiki, etc, so those will become snappier as well. -- Hard drives are becoming real dinosaurs. We still have a few left from the old days but in terms of active use the only HDDs we feel we really need to keep now are the ones we use for backups and grok data, owing to the amount of storage needed for those functions. Five years ago when we received the blade server that now sits in the colo, we had a small 256G SSD for root on every blade, and everything else used HDDs. To make things operate smoothly, most of that 256G root SSD was assigned to swapcache (200G of it, in fact, in most cases). Even just 2 years ago replacing all those HDDs with SSDs, even just the ones being used to actively serve data and support developers, would have been cost prohibitive. But today it isn't and the only HDDs we really need anywhere are for backups or certain very large bits of bulk data (aka the grok source repository and index). The way things are going, even the backup drives will probably become SSDs over the next two years. -Matt -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/users/attachments/20180713/4ba82314/attachment.html>