What's Under the Tree?
By Ole Kasper. Friday, 22. December 2006, 15:43:02
For Christmas, we guys down here in the monkey dungeon wanted hardware. Even more hardware. A month or so ago we were rumoured to have a very prominent link to the Opera Community on the Nintendo Wii Browser, and we were obviously a tiny bit worried about all the lucky folks getting a Wii under their Christmas tree barging through our doors simultaneously. 
(I don't think we got a prominent link though. 
)
So, we already have Bigma and Bigpa. Hence, enter Fatboy:
Fatboy is two IBM x3950 servers virtualised into one brutish 8 Dual Core CPU, 64GB RAM monster. With this solution we'll be able to scale both horizontally (by adding more auxilliary servers) and vertically (by simply stacking more x3950 boxes on top of the ones we have resulting in one logical server with more CPUs).
Fatboy has been fed Debian Etch, and is now currently taking over the role of Bigpa as database serving visitors which are not logged in, while Bigpa is currently put on search query duty. Our trusty Bigma master database server underwent a slight downtime period yesterday to update the firmware of the RAID controller, which will hopefully make her run smoothly through the holidays.
Fatboy originally came delivered from IBM with a puny amount of RAM (3GB), because IBM having some warehouse in Poland being raided or something. So we had to insert all those 32 sticks of RAM ourselves! Manual labour!
Below, we have Thomas holding the loot and Sverre feeding it to Fatboy.
We hope by this that we will be able to bring you the gift of gifts this Christmas: a stable Opera Community.
Atleast we have tried to stress-test the system, and with significant extra load, it weathered the requests we threw at it well. If, against (according to?) all odds something breaks, we also have 24x7 on-call duty during the holidays in case of any severe problems.
(I don't think we got a prominent link though. )So, we already have Bigma and Bigpa. Hence, enter Fatboy:
Fatboy is two IBM x3950 servers virtualised into one brutish 8 Dual Core CPU, 64GB RAM monster. With this solution we'll be able to scale both horizontally (by adding more auxilliary servers) and vertically (by simply stacking more x3950 boxes on top of the ones we have resulting in one logical server with more CPUs).
Fatboy has been fed Debian Etch, and is now currently taking over the role of Bigpa as database serving visitors which are not logged in, while Bigpa is currently put on search query duty. Our trusty Bigma master database server underwent a slight downtime period yesterday to update the firmware of the RAID controller, which will hopefully make her run smoothly through the holidays.Fatboy originally came delivered from IBM with a puny amount of RAM (3GB), because IBM having some warehouse in Poland being raided or something. So we had to insert all those 32 sticks of RAM ourselves! Manual labour!
Below, we have Thomas holding the loot and Sverre feeding it to Fatboy. We hope by this that we will be able to bring you the gift of gifts this Christmas: a stable Opera Community.
Atleast we have tried to stress-test the system, and with significant extra load, it weathered the requests we threw at it well. If, against (according to?) all odds something breaks, we also have 24x7 on-call duty during the holidays in case of any severe problems.
WIDGETIZE
João Eiras # 22. December 2006, 16:53
Kc4 the Great # 22. December 2006, 18:36
Ole Kasper # 22. December 2006, 20:02
_Grey_ # 22. December 2006, 20:20
I feel your pain
Robert Błaut # 22. December 2006, 23:21
But the one dropped on Nagasaki was called Fat Man. So FatBoy is a combination of two bombs names
Matt Cox # 23. December 2006, 10:27
Ole Kasper # 23. December 2006, 19:43
John Parnefjord # 4. January 2007, 15:32
I've order exactly the same machines just before christmas, two X3950's with 4 processors and 32GB each. They are about to arrive next week
The system that is to be replaced is running Debian and I'm planning to stick to that distro as that is what I prefer. I just wonder if you use the kernel that is packaged for Etch or do you use a custom kernel and if so would you like to share the .config file?
If you are wondering the servers are to be used as db server with replication, not as one big monster server.
// John
Sverre Stoltenberg # 5. January 2007, 12:23
The name has nothing to do with nuclear bombs btw. It is not that easy to choke up new hostnames every time.
/S.
Arthur Wilkinson # 17. January 2007, 05:04
Almost makes me wish I lived in Norway.
Charles Schloss # 12. December 2008, 17:35
I can't even image how that would run on a laptop or desktop if they could handle that much RAM