The migration took much less than expected, what considering we rehearsed it three times was not that strange. 12 hours after finishing the job my DNS in Sweden upgraded its registers and I could access the site again. I got happily surprised when Madworm (one of the Arduino users in forum) sent me this picture showing a performance test he ran on the new server which happens to be about a million times better than one he made about two months ago.

(c) 2010 Madworm, Arduino server performance test

These are good news, we are happy, I am happy. Also, if you are a webadmin and are interested in what we learned from this. Here our 50cents.

– our forum wasn’t really the problem until now, no matter how much load the performance tests were showing, we have been monitoring the website for months and the load on the forum -which is made in perl- was of about 3 requests/second, 5 at most … that is not enough to crash our server (not even the old one)

– our blog and wiki report maximum 20 to 30 requests per second, again … not really a problem

– the downloads from our server, which are reported as httpd processes, generate up to 500GB of hidden traffic in a month, they are up to 90 simultaneous processes, enough not to let the CPU have enough processing power to do anything else

We are going to test this extent by removing the downloads until the end of January to a different server. We like Googlecode and the service they provide us for the software releases, but we still want to have our own copy of our software and documentation for people to get directly from us. And just for the record, here some screenshots I took this morning while doing the doo.

(c) 2010 Arduino team, server migration process

(c) 2010 Arduino team, server migration process

(c) 2010 Arduino team, server migration process

(c) 2010 Arduino team, server migration process