FabulousEntertainment

I’ve left it a little late to do the rankings, but here they are at last:

There’s not that much news this time. Swinging Heaven has declined, Fab Swingers has moved up and there haven’t been any very dramatic changes.

The gap between Fab and Adult Hub has narrowed looking at the more recent data and you can see this graphically on Google Trends for Websites. Looking at users online Fab has 1016 right now verses 753 at the Hub and the Alexa weekly rankings show Fab well ahead so personally I think that we have already overtaken them but the stats have yet to catch up.

I’ve finished the migration more or less. The great news is that the new configuration has fixed the performance problems and it looks like there is now plenty of headroom for growth.

I now have one server with MySQL and the application server on it which serves the pages of the site. The other server does the photos and outgoing mail. The photos are uploaded to the application server but are accessed via a caching proxy (Apache) on the other server.

At the moment the load on the MySQL/application server is no more than about 0.50 but the photo server is double that. Part of the problem is that I haven’t yet managed to get mod_expire working so the headers are missing.

However I am now pretty happy that this configuration will take me to at least 2 million pageviews a day. It’s also just a huge relief not to have the site on the edge of collapse!

PS. I have also signed up with rsync.net for backup. The Planet do have backup options but rsync.net is a bit cheaper and also I prefer to have the backup with a completely different provider.

I’ve had some more thoughts about how to handle the photo/assets server. Rather than trying to rsync the images from the applications server I’m going to set up a caching proxy (probably using lighttpd but I may use Apache instead).

This will be massively simpler than periodically rsyncing images over and will require no change to the application. The only negative is that it won’t provide an online backup but I can address that separately.

While I’m migrating the applications server to the new hardware I’ll use rinetd to forward requests while I wait for the DNS to fully propagate.

UPDATE: Rather than lighttpd or Apache I think I shall use Squid as the proxy.