As part of my work to fix the search system running out of disk space recently, I carried out a review of other performance and operational stuff for the software and VMs that the site and forums run on. That review led me to (just now) change the configuration of the webserver that serves the forums to basically operate out of RAM as much as possible.
There's still work to be done to allow the database server to do the same, but in my testing on the development site, allowing nginx to operate in RAM as much as possible was still responsible for a large chunk of extra per-request performance.
I wanted to write that down here so there's a log of what I'm working on, what should improve or change in terms of you accessing the site or forums, and what the benefits and tradeoffs are. Later this year the forums will move to an SSD-backed system for even more performance, but the system barely hits disk as it is (average disk R/W is < 1MB/s with the RAM usage and cache tuning enabled today).
There's still work to be done to allow the database server to do the same, but in my testing on the development site, allowing nginx to operate in RAM as much as possible was still responsible for a large chunk of extra per-request performance.
I wanted to write that down here so there's a log of what I'm working on, what should improve or change in terms of you accessing the site or forums, and what the benefits and tradeoffs are. Later this year the forums will move to an SSD-backed system for even more performance, but the system barely hits disk as it is (average disk R/W is < 1MB/s with the RAM usage and cache tuning enabled today).
