I’ve just completed moving the site over to the newer, faster servers, and everything appears to be working fine. There was no downtime that I was aware of, and everything went really smoothly. I’ve not done any concrete testing of the speed yet, but the site seems to be functioning a lot faster now. I’ve still got a few optimizations to make in the code to take advantage of some new features. The site is fairly complicated, so there is a chance that I missed something. I’ll be keeping a close eye on some log files over the next couple days, but if you see anything strange, please let me know about it so that I can make sure that it is running correctly.
For anybody that is interested in the technical details, the new servers run CentOS 6 which includes updates to many applications. I was specifically looking for some of the latest MySQL and PHP features that weren’t available in the CentOS 5 standard repository. The physical servers are also much more powerful and have more memory and faster/bigger disks as well. They are hosted with RimuHosting.com in a very well-connected data center in Dallas TX.
