Re: label.gnome.org online

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Sat, 2006-05-27 at 20:26 -0300, Guilherme de S. Pastore wrote:
> Em S� 2006-05-27 �19:22 -0400, Owen Taylor escreveu:
> > Is anoncvs really the problem? it should be pretty light in memory usage
> > and that's the only really important resource... the problematical
> > things a while ago were more the python web services (blogs, live)
> 
> Everything is pretty much under control currently (thanks Olav Vitters
> for fixing NewsBruiser), but there are far too many services on window.
> As I said, it's not responsible for all the load, but it helps load the
> machine, specially when long operations make it take several minutes of
> CPU time.
> 
> As far as I can tell, it would help, it is the easiest one to move, and
> is the one we will have to keep around for the least time.

My basic take on that would be that load is more or less irrelevant
unless it is indicative of another problem ... so, if you have a load
of 50 because you have 50 python processes running and more starting
every minute, you are in trouble, but if you have a load of 20 because
you have a bunch of CVS processes, httpd's, etc, there's probably no
issue; things may be a bit slower, but they'll be reliable.

To increase reliability (and decrease babysitting) what you want to do
is one of two things:

 - Move services that are likely to take the machine down
  
   An example would be to move the docs rebuilds elsewhere (though
   they haven't actually caused problems for quite some time).

 - Move services that are especially crucial and are bad to go down

   An example would be to move www.gnome.org elsewhere because it's
   pretty lightweight and stable and we don't want it to go down.

The way I'd characterize our current setup is that we have:

 - window: everything that is unstable
 - other three machines: various critical services, that tend
   to be more stable (CVS, NFS, mail, LDAP, database, elsewhere)

Which means that window is heavily loaded and not all that stable
(relatively speaking) but services like CVS stay up very well. I don't
think there would be any harm to moving anoncvs, but I wouldn't
expect it to help much either; it's likely to take the machine down
nor is it a critical service.

						Owen

(Thanks, by the way, for your work at keeping window running smoothly!)