Socorro Moves to New Hardware

What has two quad core 3GHz 64bit CPUs, sixteen gigs of RAM and makes the Socorro users happy? That would be the new hardware that the Socorro system moved to during a six hour operation on Thursday night. The new hardware was recommended by the folks from the aptly named PostgreSQL Experts, Inc after an intense week of consultation and analysis in March earlier this year. After auditing our existing system of hardware and software, it was apparent that we were woefully underpowered for what we were trying to do. While simply tuning PostgreSQL helped in the interim, a more powerful platform was clearly in order.

Before we deployed the new hardware, we had to take several steps to tame our voracious use of disk space. In the previous week, we removed the archived dumps from the database. They were rarely ever accessed but took up the lion’s share of our disk space. By migrating them to file system storage, we made a three hundred gig database migration onto new hardware into a migration of only sixty gig.

While there may be a need for tuning over the next week, Socorro users should have a much accelerated experience using the Socorro Web site.

Many thanks to aravind for shepherding this project through IT, chizu in IT for his db cloning/replication scripting/tweaking and jberkus from PostgreSQL Experts for his superior navigation skills and a steady hand at the PostgreSQL tiller.