LiveBlog: Surviving the 2008 Elections at DailyKos.com
More from Velocity 2009:
Jeremy Bingham, DailyKos.com
Before the flood
- fell over a lot
- took a lot of admin time
- slow load times
MySQL issues
- legacy tables from nearly-decade-old Slash with bad primary keys
- many MySQL 3.23isms—didn’t use any newer features
- had to stop believing “things are there for a reason” (e.g. fulltext index: 9GB data, 17GB index)
- keep all the old URLs working
IA Caucus first big night
Caching
- Started with apache 1.3 as proxy, disk caching with push to disk
- Brought site to its knees as everything updated cache in sync
- switched to lighttpd using Vua, mod_magnet
- switched to mod_mcpage, cache pages only
Hardware
- 10 2x Xeons 2GB, 2 2x Opterons 8GB, image/memcached/combined search/SMTP server
- All independent, update separately
- updated to 6 4x Xeons 8GB, 2 8x Xeons 16GB, RAID 10 with well-tuned xfs for DB
Traffic more than doubled at election peak over normal monthly, almost 3x
People liked to talk about Sarah Palin … a lot. How nice that she provided things to talk about.
Changes were in place by April 2008/Pennsylvania primary
- perf was good
- flash electoral map was on 100Mb switch
- webhead loads ~0.5-1.8
- Ads and map added some slowdowns
blog comments powered by Disqus
Published
23 June 2009