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RMRK Announcements, Support, Feedback and Archives => Forum Announcements => News & Updates => Topic started by: Roph on May 18, 2010, 08:58:22 AM

Title: RMRK Is Growing
Post by: Roph on May 18, 2010, 08:58:22 AM
 :) That is all.

Just kidding, as you might have noticed, recently RMRK's had some instabilities. It just crashed tonight, right before I was going to sleep. Good thing I caught it else I'd only be posting this tomorrow afternoon otherwise.

The problem is that RMRK is outgrowing its server. RMRK runs on a VPS, which stands for Virtual Private Server. Essentially, a big beefy server is split up into smaller virtualised servers, each independent with their own resources and so on. It's a great way to get the performance of high class server hardware (RMRK is served from a server with 15k rpm RAID 10 drives with sixteen CPUs, no kidding), without the unreliability of a dedicated server built from commodity parts.

Lately as RMRK has gotten bigger and busier, the resources required to store, search, sort and serve everything have gone up also. I've actually impressed some nerds with what I'm managing to squeeze out of my current plan. But the boundries of those resoures are now often being stepped on, resulting in the instability.

Switching to SMF2 has helped, and so will the upcoming rewrite of the code behind crankeye.com (as well as new features), but RMRK is still in the orange/red :-\

(http://i39.tinypic.com/30rwk7k.jpg)

RMRK currently runs on the "Essential" plan. As you can see, the next one up has double the memory, and memory is what is in short supply for RMRK. It also happens to cost nearly twice as much though.

Along with support from various members, I've paid thousands of dollars over the years towards running RMRK, and will continue to do so. $90 a month for RMRK is a bit of a pinch though.

At this point, one or two users might chime in and be kind enough to donate notable sums. I'd ask that you don't. Instead, perhaps we could try something else. Along with the recent forum upgrades is a subscription based one. Imagine if instead of one person donating double figures, instead it was spread out by multiple people with figures that were individually tiny, but together were quite formidable.

This is where the idea for RMRK+ comes from. The price is set at $3, and it lasts 4 weeks. Why $3? Any lower and the cut paypal takes becomes an even more ridiculous percentage of the total than it already is.

Before you go worrying that the plus sign means that features will get restricted and so on - don't. It's always been a mantra of RMRK to never limit anything and give everything to everybody, and that won't ever change. However, that does of course make it more of a double edged sword, making for less incentive to donate. Only frivolous things such as a badge or custom userbar (sup anski) could be possible.

At the moment this is just a test; depending on how it works out we could be on double the RAM and smooth sailing by tomorrow night. Any suggestions are welcome.

If you like the sound of this, you can find the option in your profile (http://rmrk.net/index.php?action=profile;area=subscriptions).

Also, if anybody does this, please post your experience using it. It doesn't let me test redundant payments.
Title: Re: RMRK Is Growing
Post by: Roph on May 18, 2010, 10:28:30 AM
Everything hadn't finished being fixed yet when I first posted this, so an hour or so of stuff is now only between me, zylos and grafikal :zwink:

Don't worry about your thing grafikal, I'll do that manually (since the forum essentially "forgot"). It actually showed me a problem, it moved you TO the donator group, FROM being a moderator lol. Stripped you of your power. I'll work on another alternate way to manage all this based on secondary membergroups, but that will take a little longer to write, and thus a little longer before all the cool stuff starts happening.

As for RMRK itself, I've been working on this for around 11 hours now and RMRK is up, fast and and postable (3 hours ago you could browse but couldn't post  :-\ ).

Search is dead for now though, and dead deliberately. For now, you will have to use google (http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Armrk.net+). I'll make the search form up top use google search in the next theme update. RMRK has been nothing but problems recently, sorry I can't keep it all up working. I fix one thing and something else breaks :'(
Title: Re: RMRK Is Growing
Post by: Moss. on May 18, 2010, 12:28:46 PM
I just did it. Seems easy enough, it just sets up a recurring payment through paypal.
Title: Re: RMRK Is Growing
Post by: EvilM00s on May 18, 2010, 01:46:13 PM
Roph, feel no need to apologise for anything. You're carrying an entire community on your shoulders, and for that we are very grateful. Well done, sir.
Title: Re: RMRK Is Growing
Post by: Asch on May 18, 2010, 04:19:28 PM
You're doing fine, man.  Don't feel bad.

Wish I could help out, I really do.  Maybe when things on my end settle down I'll throw some money at you.

(Also, hate to bring it up since there's so much else going on, but all the text everywhere looks like it's far too bolded on my screen.  D: )
Title: Re: RMRK Is Growing
Post by: Grafikal on May 18, 2010, 05:36:13 PM
:o zylos and my post is gone. anyways, i donated. <3
Title: Re: RMRK Is Growing
Post by: tSwitch on May 18, 2010, 06:04:21 PM
yeah it seems posts are deleting themselves.
Title: Re: RMRK Is Growing
Post by: Zylos on May 18, 2010, 06:19:30 PM
It's not just our posts. RMRK did a mini-rollback last night, so Roph just reposted this thread.
Title: Re: RMRK Is Growing
Post by: modern algebra on May 18, 2010, 09:12:19 PM
I think I did it, but Paypal was being sneaky so I'm not sure.

Also, the topic title makes me think of this - why is it that since the move to SMF2 we've been getting 29-64 new members per day? I am unable to make any reasonable connection between those two events.
Title: Re: RMRK Is Growing
Post by: Jules on May 19, 2010, 10:56:02 AM
Did my part <3

And I encourage everyone who has a paypal account to do theirs as well. Dang people, it's $3, I would confidently wager you spend more than that a week on snacks and sodas.  RMRK is my favorite place to visit online.  I'll do whatever I can to help it, and all of you ^_^
Title: Re: RMRK Is Growing
Post by: Moss. on May 19, 2010, 12:53:50 PM
Every time I see this thread, I read it as "RMRK Is Growling."
Title: Re: RMRK Is Growing
Post by: Zylos on May 19, 2010, 01:15:42 PM
Rawr~ *limpwrist*
Title: Re: RMRK Is Growing
Post by: ltearth on May 19, 2010, 05:13:51 PM
I just donated $6.00, the Economy may be slow and people may whine about money, but sometimes you have to give to get. This is a great community and honestly, I am not active on here every single day. I did not only donate because of the forum, but also because when I need a resource or script, RMRK is there for me. I donated for all the resources and ideas I have got from this great forum. This is a fantastic forum and very please to donate.

*Applause*

Thank you rulers of RMRK for a great community.
Title: Re: RMRK Is Growing
Post by: Irock on May 19, 2010, 06:22:43 PM
I'll be able to do this when I'm 18 and have a job. ;9
Title: Re: RMRK Is Growing
Post by: :) on May 21, 2010, 12:45:45 PM
I'll be able to do this when I'm 18 and have a job. ;9

you need to be 18 to have a job?
Title: Re: RMRK Is Growing
Post by: Cascading Dragon on May 21, 2010, 07:31:25 PM
I had a job three years ago at 14. So...
Title: Re: RMRK Is Growing
Post by: mouse on May 30, 2010, 12:22:15 AM
How the hell do you manage to outgrow a $49/month VPS? o.O

If you're considering paying 89+ a month you might as well get a dedicated machine :x
Title: Re: RMRK Is Growing
Post by: Roph on May 30, 2010, 10:25:15 AM
Cheap dedicated is so 2000s. A cheap dedicated is a stupid option. You will be running on commodity hardware. Think standard SATA drives, an E5200 or something, and non ECC memory. One piece of your hardware fails? Bye to your site, and expect to pay to replace that part.

Virtualization means you bear the cost of the uber hardware with the other residents. RMRK is served from a box with 15k rpm RAID 10 SAS drives and with 16 X5570 cores :)

Currently memory usage is at 470MB, a little below average. RMRK is the biggest resource hogger by far, but it isn't the only thing that runs on this server. Not that'd I'd ever end up this popular on the web, but I'd stick with Virtualization all the way up to here (http://www.servint.net/supervps.php). I've been with these guys for almost 4 years now and I love them, I'm not going anywhere :)