My Opera News

It's been a while since we deployed the first static server for My Opera.
It was a really necessary step, because we had, and we continue to have, lots of static resources to be served.
A while back, most of these resources were served by applications, causing much more load on servers than necessary.
Now most of the heaviest ones have been already moved to the static servers.

Some months ago we also added support for partitioning of the user resources in our storage software layer. That means making sure that if we have the need to scale serving of resources on different machines, we can either replicate the entire content on different ones, or split the content over 2 or more machines. That part worked nicely so far. That's why at some point there was a static.myopera.com and static02.myopera.com.

Now there's also static03.myopera.com

We changed our setup again, transparently (for you users), to consolidate the previously recycled/temporary hardware into a new shiny machine with more disk space. On this machine, we installed lighttpd instead of our usual Apache setup. We wanted to try out this software. For us it was the first time we tried it on a production setup.

Edoardo played with it for a while, prepared the setup and installed it on static03. As of today, it has been running perfectly for nearly 1 month with a really low load, and peaks of 250 accesses per second. It's serving around 14M hits per day for avatars, user pictures, skin thumbnails, etc...