ORIGINAL: acw
Hey Ghost, I did not mean this as a criticism but rather a suggestion regarding priorities. RCU is awesome and I spend probably 20mn or more on it every day. I'm in the software industry myself and suspect that there are many options to make RCU faster withing changing the software.
Viewed from here, it appears that RCU is IO bound at the limit. Sometimes, an HTTP request can take more than 1mn to be served. RCU probably needs more web servers and web servers need to be configured to deny traffic sooner to avoid having everyone wait for a very long time. An easy way to do this would be to decrease the number of connection that the web servers accepts. If you do this some people won't go through until you add web servers but at least whoever getting through will have a good experience.
Arnaud
Arnaud,
Actually we have overkill in terms of web servers. We have five (5) front end web servers all well within their load limits. We can actually lose a pair of those and the remaining 3 wont' break a sweat. We have 2 dedicated db servers. Cisco firewall and cisco load balancer to keep traffic even across the bank of servers. We also have dedicated mail server. Dedicated ad servers. Private GB networks for all back talk on our server farm. Extremely robust hardware. The slowdowns will typically be in certain operations in our software. Some queries may need further optimization as we are around 8 million records and queries and proper indexing and statistics are critical. Sometimes you may be seeing a slowdown when our ad server updates or when we do a db backup dump. These things can stall the site for 30 seconds or a minute or two depending on the exact time of the day and week.
If you see a slowdown or hang in the forum though do this. Open a new browser window and try to hit the homepage of the site. Most likely it will load instantly unless the update is the ad server which does a 30 second to 1.5 minute recalculation every 2 hours.
The new forum does give me some performance concerns we saw on launch so we are tabling it right now and going to look at adding some features to this codebase and see how far we can get. Obviously the shock value with small changes and the same skin here will be far lower then the new skin everyone saw.
marc