What hardware is behind BYC?

[Im4Eggcellence]

So, as a professional computer programmer, techie, and general nerd, I'm curious as to exactly what hardware/software is behind the scenes here. Anyone care to elaborate a little?

 

[DuckLady]

You can PM Nifty-Chicken, the owner. He is the man behind the curtain....The Wonderful Wizard of BYC.

 

[Nifty-Chicken]

We run everything on a LAMP environment. Our servers are in a colo where we run on Intel Xeon Dual Quad core (yes, 8) CPU machine with 15K RPM hot swap SCSI/SAS Hard Drives in a RAID 10 config.

The colo has continuous battery backup, generators, more than a ton (literally) of cooling capacity, high tech security, and fire suppression. I'm a few thousand miles from the server, but fortunately I have full root access and can do pretty much everything except swap out hardware. Fortunately the NOC is staffed 24/7 so if/when I need help I can simply call and talk to someone.

Even though our datacenter provides extremely reliable systems and backups I am pretty picky about backups. I do daily backups of the entire forum database and keep up to 7 copies of these daily backup at various locations all over the planet! You can read more about how I backup all of BYC here: http://www.nifty-stuff.com/daily-mysql-database-backup.php

So, does that info feed your inner geek?

 

[MoodyChicken]

It's magic that makes BYC run... and pixie dust.

 

[Im4Eggcellence]

Quote:
Yes, thank you that was a very nice geek snack

It's amazing how much you can do with a LAMP environment these days... it's come a long ways. So what disto of Linux are you running? And any idea of the total size of the DB?

It's a very impressive site, I've been quite impressed with the response times realizing that there is obviously a lot of SQL/DHTML going on in the background.

The website developer app is quite impressive too for it's speed. Until recently, I was doing website work for the Nat'l Park Service - they have a template system built on top of the PaperThin Common Spot Content Server product and it's performance in web content generation was a real dog in comparison.

Thanks again for the "tour".

 

[Whitehouse Quail]

Quote:
Yes, thank you that was a very nice geek snack

It's amazing how much you can do with a LAMP environment these days... it's come a long ways. So what disto of Linux are you running? And any idea of the total size of the DB?

It's a very impressive site, I've been quite impressed with the response times realizing that there is obviously a lot of SQL/DHTML going on in the background.

The website developer app is quite impressive too for it's speed. Until recently, I was doing website work for the Nat'l Park Service - they have a template system built on top of the PaperThin Common Spot Content Server product and it's performance in web content generation was a real dog in comparison.

Thanks again for the "tour".

x2!

 

[hannakat]

wooaa....pixie dust indeed! Not being anythinggeeklike......it is indeed a miracle. Thank you for taking such good care of us!

 

[call ducks]

 

[Dutchgirl]

The first paragraph of Nifty's post might as well have been written in a foreign language! I barely understood any of it!

 

[Oldfort_mailman]

Quote:
I finished up my degree in information technology five years ago but since I was already full time at the post office I never use it. After reading the previous posts about the site and how it runs and on what software, all I could say if asked about it is that I have no earthly idea and "I am apparently not smarter than a fifth grader."