Preliminary info: Server upgrade in plans

[Sami]

AirwaySim's web server system will be upgraded soon. Our current setup has served us well and since it has been in use from winter 2013 it is already good time to retire that hardware. This upgrade allows us to give you the best possible service and to develop better features in the future too (by increasing the calculation capacity).

At the same time we will also switch our ISP (service provider) since the support and services from current ISP (Nebula) have not been satisfactory. Our new servers will still be located in Finland (like already currently), and we will continue to use own dedicated hardware for best capacity and configurability.

Since some of the testing and setup work is still in progress no exact time / date has been set for the upgrade but plans are to do it by the end of this month.

During the upgrade all games will be paused and website will be unaccessible for approximately 2-4 hours. We will inform you all a few days prior of the exact time of this maintenance window.

This is a pure hardware upgrade so there will not be any feature changes or updates. All of the background systems like database engines and other such sofware will be updated but these are not visible to users.

The next new game worlds (apart from normal rotation of Beginner's World) will begin after this upgrade is complete.

[schro]

I'm curious to know more about the technical specs of the current/future server for entertainment...

[Sami]

Current / to-be-retired setup is a dedicated server using single 3rd gen i7 CPU and 16 GB RAM, so not much compared to today's standards anymore but has worked well and was a very reliable choice in the end.

New system will have two dedicated servers, both have single 8th gen i7 CPU, 64 GB RAM and NVMe storage disks. (Preliminary tests show that some background processes have about ten times faster speed...)

(Intel Xeon based setups might offer more speed but they become then quite costly, so the i7 is a good balance)

[schro]

Is this more of a hot spare arrangement or will there be a load balancer in front? (Or perhaps different game worlds on different servers?)

i7's are absolutely fine if you don't need the enterprise features in the Xeons. If you're moving from spinning disks to NVMe (SSD) disks, then that will help tremendously....

[JumboShrimp]

You get the biggest bang for the buck when you car run all (sql server, web server) on the same box, on one CPU.

Once you go beyond that, costs go up, and efficiency of added resource go down.