So, a while ago, Sun donated some servers to Wikimedia. We managed to earmark one of them for the Toolserver, but for various reasons, it couldn’t be delivered to Amsterdam, so it ended up at our Tampa facility. It’s been sitting there ever since, until yesterday, when we managed to rack it and set up its OS and array. The server is a Sun Fire X4150, with 2 quad-core 2.8GHz CPUs, 32GB RAM, 4 146GB system disks, and an external array with 12 15′000 rpm 146GB SAS disks. Originally, it was meant to be a database server, but there’s not much point putting a single database server at Tampa, so now we’re looking for other uses.
The most obvious is to provide a US replica for cache.stable.toolserver.org, the caching proxy in front of the stable server; this will improve WikiMiniAtlas performance for North American users (the only tool currently using the cache). But that’s only a tiny load, so it would be a waste to use the entire server for just that. Other possibilities include moving our webapps (e.g. JIRA) there, which would free up some resources from the server hosting them in Amsterdam. No doubt, there are several other things we could use it for… please feel free to offer suggestions.
#1 by River Tarnell at January 24th, 2009
Well, this is referring to the new hardware that will arrive in February. I don’t think putting bots on this server would be a good idea; if we need more userland servers, they should be added to the normal cluster. (Doing NFS, MySQL etc. over a transatlantic link is not going to result in good performance.)
#2 by Darkoneko at January 25th, 2009
What about a zone for bots that don’t need any mySQL access ?
since that would still pose problems for the DNS, maybe as an independant thing… ? (I think there’s a distinct account for the stable toolserver, so why not for this one too)