Aug 26
If you’re looking for a logo for Wahanda we’ve uploaded a zip file containing some common sizes and formats.
You can access it here: www.wahanda.com/resources/.
If you’ld like any additional ones let us know.
Aug 10
After a lot of deliberations and a fairly huge amount of effort from all involved we now have a uk based hosting solution up and running with our new provider Clara.net.
We have 6 servers involved in running the wahanda.com site. It’s a fairly standard configuration that should give us enough capacity to support 10x current peak traffic and is easily scalable beyond that by adding more kit.
UK Hosting Overview
One of the big unknowns in the process was how much power we would actually end up using. Working out the exact power consumption for a server is notoriously difficult. So many factors are involved and the way they interact is not always predictable. I’m sure someone who has a better background in electronics could do it better but generally I find the easiest thing to do is to buy some hardware and measure. Once it was all in place we measured 3.0A in total, which actually gives us some headroom for more kit should we need it!
The atom servers are discussed in a previous post and worked out at 0.35A when measured individually. That’s more than we originally hoped but the dual-core Atom is a little hungrier than the single and we’ve got 2 sata drives in each one (mirrored) which pushes us up a bit as well.
Our web servers are single socket quad-core Dell R200 rack servers. Our underlying architecture is ideally suited to 3 cores per host so these work pretty well. We’ve also finally moved to a full 64-bit stack, making full use of the 4Gb RAM in each one. We balance load equally across the 3 web servers which gives us good redundancy as well as performance. 0.5A each for these.
The database server is the only really expensive piece of kit, being a hefty Dell 2950 III with dual quad, 8GB RAM and lots of disks. We rely on a highly normalised database model so really need this to perform. As expected this machine draws about a third of the total consumption in the rack at 1.0A.
Shiny lights...
One thing I’ve kept very much in mind during this process is how little hardware we should need to support the amount of traffic we have. Coming from a high traffic corporate environment (previously was at lastminute.com) you get used to having a very large amount of hardware running anything and everything. Some of this is justified but a lot is down to a legacy of throwing hardware at problems rather than fixing the underlying apps.
the most impressive site I know of in terms of pageviews per server has to be Plenty of fish. They serve 12k+ pages per second on a mere handful of servers. There is a whole load of de-normalisation going on to make this possible, and I would argue that this sort of model where the pages are completely simplified / optimised / written inline doesn’t work for larger dev teams but it’s still damn impressive.
Anyway, we’re live now so hopefully you’ll all notice the improvement in performance if you’re in the uk. We’ll be launching our u.s.a. hosting setup in the next couple of weeks so if you’re located across the atlantic and have noticed a slowdown it won’t last long.