July 8, 2011 at 6:42 pm EDT · Filed under Service Upgrades
PHP 5. 2 will be retired from the primary web server on Saturday, September 3, 2011 at 12 AM EDT (-0400 GMT) in accordance with its end-of-life announcement in July 2010. After this time, PHP 5.3, which is the currently recommended version, will be promoted as the primary PHP interpreter. Those whose sites are not compatible with PHP 5.3 may delegate page requests to the secondary HTTP server that will continue to run PHP 5.2 until at least March 2012.
As we near a transitioning point, tools will become available within the control panel to facilitate a fallback to PHP 5.2. For most sites this will be a seamless transition.
Until September 3, you may manually test PHP 5.3 by following our article within the resource center.
Permalink
December 19, 2011 at 8:22 pm EST · Filed under Maintenance, Service Upgrades
Apollo and Borel will undergo hardware changes on Thursday, December 22 at 12 AM EST (-0500 GMT). Servers will be down for ~20 minutes each to make changes.
Apollo will receive a dual-core to quad-core upgrade to further assess our new hosting platform capabilities. Apollo has in extreme situations become CPU bound – exceeding the processing capabilities of its current dual-core arrangement. Processor speed will be upgraded from 2x 2 GHz dual-core Xeon processors to 2x 3 GHz quad-core Xeon processors.
Borel has been reporting SCSI I/O timeouts despite disk consistency checks passing. This behavior is typical of a faulty backplane cable that will be replaced on Thursday.
Permalink
November 12, 2011 at 1:42 pm EST · Filed under Maintenance, Service Upgrades
Apollo will undergo a kernel upgrade on Thursday at 12 AM EST (-0500 GMT) to improve filesystem performance. After local testing, we are pleased to announce that Apollo will continue to provide an innovative hosting platform by using v3 of the Linux kernel. v3 introduces several optimizations and stability improvements over v2.6.35 released in August 2010 that has been used on Apollo since last year.
During this time too, aufs, which provides our filesystem technology will undergo a couple changes. First, direct branch access detection will be disabled to reduce time taken to access a file on a client’s writeable branch. Second, path traversal calculations have been traditionally calculated within the kernel-space instead of user-space to resolve crashes inside directories containing a large number of inodes. Since deploying Apollo in 2009, this problem is no longer reproducible.
This outage is expected to last 30 – 45 minutes during which time the proposed changes will be verified to ensure no complications arise. Maintenance should conclude around 1 AM EST after which time load averages will be monitored to ensure I/O wait spikes dissipate that occur as aufs’ cache is filled then expunged in v2.6.35.
Permalink
Categories
Archives
RSS