User:Southparkfan/SiteUpdate

Orain Site Update #3

This is the Site Update for September, October, November and December 2014.

Technical Changes

• All Orain wikis are now running on the HipHop Virtual Machine (also known as HHVM) environment. This is an environment almost the same as PHP, but it's faster with processing PHP scripts.
• All Orain servers are now running Ubuntu Trusty (14.04), to work with HHVM.
• prod3 and prod4 have been removed from the cluster, see the "Technical Issues" part for more information.
• prod8, prod9 and prod11 have been added to the cluster. They serve MediaWiki, images and XML dumps.
• prod10 has been added to the cluster, in the beginning as a CirrusSearch server for All The Tropes Wiki, but it has been recycled as a HAProxy server, which load balances the traffic among the 3 MediaWiki servers.
• Orain is now hosting its own DNS. Before Orain used to host its DNS at CloudFlare. Anyone wanting to view Orain's DNS records or to propose changes, can take a look here.

Technical Issues

• prod4 has been removed from the cluster due to repeated OS (operating system) failures and after several installs. prod4 has been replaced by prod9.
• For a while (but mainly in December), HHVM wasn't fulfilling requests which caused slow wikis and 504 errors. A load balancer has been implemented (which spreads all requests among the MediaWiki servers), and some extra MediaWiki servers were added, to solve this. See also the incident logs on techwiki.
• Orain experienced 2 hours of downtime, because a change to use another MariaDB version led into a MariaDB crash on prod3. All data (pages, user information, page text, etc.) was successfully transferred to a new server, prod12. prod3 has been permanently removed from the cluster. See also the incident logs on techwiki.

On behalf of the Orain staff, [timestamp]

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