OFFICIAL "SERVER PROBLEMS" THREAD

[Mark Rose]

Originally Posted by Madpoo

2) HTML isn't compressed by the server... just on the base page text/html, compressing it would take it from 26,363 bytes to around 8,661 or so. The CSS and JS could be compressed too. Given the server's vintage, using compression could increase the CPU usage too much, and I don't think IIS 5.0 (Windows 2000) has the same settings to tell it to stop compressing content if CPU usage gets too high. IIS will at least cache a compressed version of any static resources so it probably wouldn't really hurt, but hard to say.

gzip'ping text content, especially at the lower compression levels is very, very fast. It'll add less than a 1% overhead to the PHP scripts running on the server.

Another plus to using a CDN is to offload the simple requests from the server to lessen the amount of threads IIS will use. CloudFlare is free.

[Madpoo]

Originally Posted by Mark Rose

gzip'ping text content, especially at the lower compression levels is very, very fast. It'll add less than a 1% overhead to the PHP scripts running on the server.

Another plus to using a CDN is to offload the simple requests from the server to lessen the amount of threads IIS will use. CloudFlare is free.

Yeah, gzip at maybe level 2-3 is CPU friendly, I just wasn't sure if the current server is CPU bound and if that little bit would be a back breaking piece of straw.

I'm personally a big fan of CDN's... I think I looked at Cloudflare once upon a time but when it came down to it at my work, the only real option for us was Akamai because of our global presence. There are a lot of "okay" CDNs out there that have decent POPs in North America/Europe but in the rest of the world they really drag, or they piggy back their whole thing on EC2 in limited locations.

I didn't know Cloudflare had a free option but that could be pretty good for the handful of GIF/CSS/JS.

I'm kind of annoyed right now because I had 1 TB of data that we bought on VPS.net (which was actually using some other CDN) a couple years back, right before we switched to Akamai. Last time I checked my account was still there and I still had 1 TB of data "banked" up, but now my login isn't working. I thought I could donate that bandwidth but I guess not. Oh well... it was like $500 for 1 TB of transferred data so that kind of stinks, but we didn't use it for several years...it figures.

One thing did catch my eye when checking out the website... it's IIS 5 which equals Windows 2000. At least that's what the server puts in it's headers. If it's Windows 2000 it could very well be SQL 2000, so right away I'm thinking that just getting newer hardware *PLUS* updating the OS would be a nice bonus.

Maybe someone out there has an unused retail license of Windows/SQL. All I have are MSDN and VL licenses otherwise I'd be more than happy to donate a license to the cause. I should probably dig through my old pile of CDs...there could be a retail disc in there for 2008 versions maybe. Not for that current DL360 G4p though... Windows 2008/SQL 2008 would probably be worse than now on just 2GB of RAM and mirrored 72GB disk. :) It would work though... I've installed Windows 2008 on those systems. But they'd want more RAM/disk at least.

[Mark Rose]

Originally Posted by Madpoo

Yeah, gzip at maybe level 2-3 is CPU friendly, I just wasn't sure if the current server is CPU bound and if that little bit would be a back breaking piece of straw.

Even at level 9 it's not that significant of overhead. We compress at 6 as much higher usually doesn't get much extra compression.

I'm personally a big fan of CDN's... I think I looked at Cloudflare once upon a time but when it came down to it at my work, the only real option for us was Akamai because of our global presence. There are a lot of "okay" CDNs out there that have decent POPs in North America/Europe but in the rest of the world they really drag, or they piggy back their whole thing on EC2 in limited locations.

We use CloudFront. It has nowhere near the edges of Akamai, and nothing in Africa, but it works well enough for our purposes. They were willing to give us a significantly better price than Akamai.

I didn't know Cloudflare had a free option but that could be pretty good for the handful of GIF/CSS/JS.

I've used it on small sites before. I would put the static resources on a different domain and let CloudFlare handle those, keeping the dynamic stuff served directly (along with robots.txt and favicon.ico). I don't think it's how they intend for their service to be used, but it works. :)

I'm kind of annoyed right now because I had 1 TB of data that we bought on VPS.net (which was actually using some other CDN) a couple years back, right before we switched to Akamai. Last time I checked my account was still there and I still had 1 TB of data "banked" up, but now my login isn't working. I thought I could donate that bandwidth but I guess not. Oh well... it was like $500 for 1 TB of transferred data so that kind of stinks, but we didn't use it for several years...it figures.

Expensive traffic! Especially when it's not used!

One thing did catch my eye when checking out the website... it's IIS 5 which equals Windows 2000. At least that's what the server puts in it's headers. If it's Windows 2000 it could very well be SQL 2000, so right away I'm thinking that just getting newer hardware *PLUS* updating the OS would be a nice bonus.

Maybe someone out there has an unused retail license of Windows/SQL. All I have are MSDN and VL licenses otherwise I'd be more than happy to donate a license to the cause. I should probably dig through my old pile of CDs...there could be a retail disc in there for 2008 versions maybe. Not for that current DL360 G4p though... Windows 2008/SQL 2008 would probably be worse than now on just 2GB of RAM and mirrored 72GB disk. :) It would work though... I've installed Windows 2008 on those systems. But they'd want more RAM/disk at least.

Windows 2000 is the last Windows I used regularly. :)

If Windows 2008 is anything like Vista, only 2 GB of RAM will have it swapping before it's finished booting lol

[Brian-E]

Originally Posted by Madpoo

I almost missed one of the more obvious things... the Google Translate button up in the top right. :) Chrome offers to translate a page if it's not in your native language, so buttons like that are increasingly less useful I guess.

I caution against underestimating the importance of a language translation facility on the page. Someone casually browsing the internet and coming across GIMPS by chance is more likely to sit up and take notice if the translation to their own language is available instantly without the need to bother to switch in other resources. It can mean the difference between taking the trouble to read about something and not doing so.

[snme2pm1]

Originally Posted by Madpoo

it's IIS 5 which equals Windows 2000

Such has been declared. at #212

Originally Posted by Prime95

Um, Windows Server 2000. Isn't that the latest version?

Though some folk didn't quite recognise George's humor at the time.

A 32 bit system would impose limits on any notion of winding up memory.

[Madpoo]

Originally Posted by snme2pm1

A 32 bit system would impose limits on any notion of winding up memory.

Yeah, there's the rub. I thought at first maybe it was already running at least Windows 2003 @ 64-bit, but no. 4GB would be it but even then, the /3GB switch in the boot.ini and the overall wacky implementation still means you're at 3GB for user apps.

SQL 2000 databases can be migrated to SQL 2008 R2. Well, I should say, I think it has to be at least SQL 2000 SP4, but in theory it works most of the time.

IIS 5 stuff should run okay in 32-bit mode of IIS 7.5 (Windows 2008 R2). I imagine any ISAPI plugins would either work, or have IIS 7.5 compatible versions by now.

PHP stuff shouldn't be a problem, if that's the underlying stuff on the site.

If by any weird reason none of those would be upgradeable to newer stuff, it could be virtualized and segmented... P2V the server. Clone it so now there's 2 virtual machines and rename one or the other of them. Make one the SQL 2000 server (or maybe it is a newer SQL, I'm just guessing), and make the other one the web/ftp/app server. Then you're not cramming it all into one 4GB memory space at least.

Windows 2000 itself only supports 4 CPU's in the standard edition, so splitting it would also help, you could allocate 4 to each separate machine.

That wouldn't be a long term solution, but seems like a decent stopgap measure until a real migration so whatever else could take place.

[Madpoo]

Originally Posted by Brian-E

I caution against underestimating the importance of a language translation facility on the page. Someone casually browsing the internet and coming across GIMPS by chance is more likely to sit up and take notice if the translation to their own language is available instantly without the need to bother to switch in other resources. It can mean the difference between taking the trouble to read about something and not doing so.

You might be right. The site has Google Analytics on it... if it's instrumented right you could tell how many times someone actually uses the Google Translate button on the page.

[Madpoo]

Originally Posted by Madpoo

Windows 2000 itself only supports 4 CPU's in the standard edition, so splitting it would also help, you could allocate 4 to each separate machine.

I'll have to correct myself... Hyper-V in Windows 2008 R2 supports a Windows Server 2000 guest OS, but with only 1 virtual CPU. Go figure.

You might be looking at VMWare for SMP support on a Windows 2000 guest.

Seems more and more like just updating the OS itself is a good idea.

George: ZIP me up an image of the disk and I'll work on it.

[NBtarheel_33]

Originally Posted by chalsall

Absolutely no disrespect intended, but why is Scott in the critical path?

Clearly things are not working well currently. Perhaps it's time for new modern hardware (which has been volunteered) and "new blood" (which has also been volunteered).

Just saying....

There wouldn't even *be* a PrimeNet without Scott. His company Entropia was a pioneer in distributed/grid computing. We were a perfect example for what his services could do, and his services were just what we needed to coordinate GIMPS across an ever-expanding network of contributors.

AFAIK, Entropia has been subsumed by another company, and Scott is no longer involved with its operations, but he continued to be involved with PrimeNet. But he certainly deserves recognition as a big part of the GIMPS/PrimeNet we interact with each day.

[NBtarheel_33]

Originally Posted by Madpoo

1) There's a call to an image /images/SBSI_logo_2008.gif that's a large, ugly, animated GIF (153 KB). What's stranger, the link when clicked on is a holding page ("Web Page Under Construction"). Doesn't seem like the best use of 153 KB of download... over half of the total data on the home page. At least the server says it's cacheable for 1 week, but even that could be higher if it's really needed.

That's the advertisement for Shaw Binary Services that appears on the left-hand side of (almost?) every PrimeNet page. Do they exist any more? Are they still providing free services to us? If no to either case, then there really is no purpose for the GIF.

Originally Posted by Madpoo

4) There's a counter being loaded from counter.digits.com that was frequently behaving pretty slow, at least when I tested. The counter at the bottom of pages is so 20th century anyway. :)

Aww...but I have been waiting with bated breath for the last few years to see what happens after 9999999...

Originally Posted by Madpoo

5) There are some other links at the bottom with images, "badges" I tihnk they're called, like Cool Site of the Day and Safe Surf. These are nothing more than old attempts at link boosting. If it were me I'd remove them, but if they really had to be there, make sure to add a nofollow so the page doesn't get penalized for link spamming.

I bet the relevance of "Cool Site of the Day" and "Safe Surf" (whatever these might mean) both have long passed. If we are going to have badges/endorsements at all, it would be far more appropriate (and probably far better for our site ranking) to have official ones from e.g. the AMS, MAA, AMATYC, etc.

Originally Posted by Madpoo

9) In general though, the page just loads slow because of back end work being done to load the page. On the home page it's not bad... there's some stuff in the left column showing daily stats ("Today's Numbers") but maybe that's only generated a few times per day, not in real time. But I was getting times of 1-2 seconds for the "time to first byte" which is pretty slow. That's my browser waiting for a response from the server.

I believe the "Today's Numbers" are updated on the hour, along with the usual "standard" PrimeNet reports.

[Batalov]

Those badges, strangely, remind me of an old Russian anecdote.
It is almost untranslatable, but I'll give it my best shot (I think I found a good equivalent of the punchline; without it, it is surely useless).

Needless to say, it is NSFW (as are most Russian anecdotes), so I will hide it.

So, this guy dates an attractive young lady, and they are getting really close, you know. The lady blushes and goes: " I have to tell you something, so that this is not a shock to you.
I've been in love before. So much in love, in fact, that I tattooed his portrait on my left breast.
Well, to be perfectly honest, then, I've loved another person, too, and I loved him just as much, so I tattooed his portrait on my right breast."
The guy contemplates for a moment, and then suddenly breaks down laughing. She asks, "What's with you?"
The guy says: "In some twenty years, I might look at them and ask, 'Why the long faces?'"