US servers back into production this weekend
The initial launch of US servers were a disappointment, as several users contested. With just 1/4th provisioned the IOWAIT was simply too high.
Now we believe this has been fixed, and the reason was due to SoftRaid level 5's BAD performance. We changed to RAID10, which means there's 50% redundancy level on the initial servers. This is not the norm, not all US servers will have RAID10, but the first servers had double sized HDDs which makes this possible.
If this isn't a good solution, then we think we can only offer higher priced US offerings in the future, to work with less users per HDD.
However, in our testing even with RAID5 performed quite nicely, with IOWAIT of 5-7% using 8M/s downstream and 6M/s upstream. We had prolonged periods of 11M/s downstream and 10+M/s upstream with these too.
The 8/6M result was achieved by using "hard to seed torrents". Network stability isn't quite as good as we are used to in EU, but the network problems seems to solve themselves out within minutes every single time.
Due to the cost restraints not better can be done in the US really. The cost point and end user price is so damn low that getting 100Mbps unmetered for much cheaper is really impossible! US servers also comes with the added benefit that there's no low prio transit or network shaping used to offer 100Mbps unmetered, it's just plain unaltered bandwidth. Our French servers have QoS utilized to prioritize different types of traffic (thus often lower FTP transfer speeds), and premium transit link capacity, but these do not have QoS or prioritization being utilized. Plain raw capacity.
During this weekend we are entering it back to production, and those wishing to move, may do so by informing via a support ticket.
We are doing a lot of load balancing these days, and upcoming 2 weeks within the servers, we are abandoning some weak providers and weak servers, in an effort to consolidate to a smaller set of different servers, and overall lower quantity of individual servers with better hardware, in order to enhance service level and to simplify management.
How to get to US server?
Open a support ticket by e-mailing to support@pulsedmedia.com or by logging into client portal.
Other transfers
We are also doing other transfers, if you fall into this category, you will be notified via a new support ticket. There is a few servers from where you get by default transferred to US servers but you can opt out. (Already notified to users on those servers)
Friday, November 5, 2010
