This post is for anyone curious about what hardware goes in to keeping Inkbunny ticking.
Inkbunny's user base is growing rapidly so it's time to upgrade our main server "Fluttershy" again!
Thanks to the generosity of our sponsors, we can easily afford to expand the server's capabilities when we need to.
We have ordered 2 x SSD disk drives to use in mirrored RAID mode for our database and we're doubling the RAM to 32GB.
The performance improvements should be huge as the web server and database will no longer be sharing a disk pack, and the expanded RAM will allow us to cache the whole database in memory.
We're expecting up to 3 hours downtime starting about 10 hours from when this journal was posted.
After the upgrade, Fluttershy's specs will be:
8 x 2.33GHz Xeon CPU cores 32GB DDR3 RAM 1TB 15kRPM SAS disk pack in RAID 5 for the web server and assets store 2 x 60GB SSD disks in RAID 1 for the database
At this stage the server load (and added cost) doesn't justify having separate database and web application servers. But that is a move we expect to make once we reach the limits of what one server can handle.
We do have a secondary server "Angel" that provides data mirroring and onsite backup, which works in conjunction with multiple offsite backup systems. But it is a low power machine designed for bulk storage only.
Unless you're spending the earth, SAS 15k is far better for database operations and typically better for RAID operations too. SSDs have an alarmingly high failure rate, you should be running them in AT LEAST RAID-10/RAID-1+spare, so 3 or 5 drives.
Hope your SSDs are SLC and not MLC. o.O Unless you're spending the earth, SAS 15k is far better for
