Sunday November 11, 2018 the Mushroom Observer database server was upgraded from 4 CPU cores to 6 CPU cores and the available RAM was doubled.
Around November 22, Alan Rockefeller analysed the logs to see what the impact was. He compared the previous week to the entire month of October 2018 and found:
Average time to respond to requests pre-upgrade: 2.29117 seconds (every request in October averaged)
Average time to respond to requests post-upgrade: 1.57632 seconds (every request in the past week averaged)
Slowest time to show an observation in October: 23.11117475 Slowest time to show an observation in the past week: 11.70513435
Average time to show an observation in October: 3.47032 seconds Average time to show an observation in the past week: 2.5416 seconds
The performance graphs also show a significant difference - searches are faster, as is the main page loading time. More importantly, the graphs are much less spiky - the spikes were times that the database was bogged down with requests, causing the whole site to slow down.
Thanks to everyone who contributed to making this change possible, especially Alan for championing this change, Rod Tulloss for inspiring more than 25 people to make generous donations to support the site and help cover our server costs, and Danny Newman for rocking the boat to kickstart the process.
It's great to see the community support changes like this. There is clearly more that could and should be done, but it's a great start.
Thanks!
-Nathan
thanks for the upgrade yall