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2005-10-10
LjSEEK.COM: September News
Huh, We're late with update this month, also instead of description
of new nice features we've implemented you've got downtime warning in
the start of October.
Now there are finally some good news.
First we're pleased to say stability problems seems to disappear the
same mysterious way as they came. The box is not crashing everytime we
start to update index any more while we were told no hardware was replaced
or anything.
Second - we're pleased to announce we're moving this service from rental
servers to our own collocation faculty in San Jose. At the same time
we're doing software updates - this version is up and running at
http://beta.ljseek.com - give it a try and let us know the problems
you'll find out. We should point main site to the same location soon.
More technical information:
From the glance view Beta version looks very similar to old one.
There are however serious changes done in underlying software.
We have updated our database structure so we'll be able to add more
features soon as well as get some speedup.
We've moved to utf8 so now non-English language search should work
better.
We've improved thumbnail generation so images are now better quality.
Setting up the collocation took a while - getting hardware, setting it
up. working around some bugs took a while. We moved our system to
x86_64 platform (64bit Xeons) and had to do some minor porting to make
programs written in C work on this platform.
Unpleasant surprise was to see PHP code also need some fixes. For
example crc32() function started to return unsigned integer instead of
signed breaking a lot of stuff. Eaccelerator which we used for caching
and locking breaks on 64bit architecture so we had to move to APC.
So if you're interested what this site will be running now it is Dell
PowerEdge sc1425 for Web Box with 2 3Ghz CPUs and 2GB RAM and Dell
PowerEdge 2850 with 8GB of RAM and 6 SCSI drives in RAID10 as Database
and Search Index box.
In the months to come we're going to add more hardware to offset search
index growth and traffic increase.
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