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 Yesterday we decided to rebuild a server named Maudslay, which is responsible for automatically building our products every night. It had recently developed a somewhat pronounced limp, due to a couple of bad blocks. on the hard disks. Fortunately, nothing was lost, though we started to notice some strange and scary behaviour.
It was the first time I actually opened it up, and I was surprised at the hard drive that had actually started to fail. It was an oldschool Seagate 20GB drive (you know, like the one Noah kept his TurboCAD drawings of the Ark on). A quick check of the Seagate date code reveals it was manufactured on 25 July 1999 - how's that for durability? The hard drives were even older than the server itself!
In any case, both of the drives have now been replaced with more modern units, configured in RAID for some extra safety. The system is also being migrated from Windows 2003 to Linux in the same go, which (together with the more modern hardware) has yielded some interesting results with regards to how fast the system builds Pick & Send - though I wondered if moving to/from Linux would make a big impact.
I was very pleasantly surprised. Compared to my development machine (a pretty-speedy Core2 Duo with plenty of RAM and a pretty speedy HDD), it absolutely flies despite having less than half of the memory of my PC...
Performance: Before and After
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My PC |
Old Maudslay |
New Maudslay
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Performance Increase |
| System startup |
2 minutes |
3-4 minutes |
10-20 seconds |
1400%* |
| Building Pick & Send |
2:30
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5:30
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40 seconds! |
825% |
* doesn't really count because it's been changed from Windows to Linux, but still!
... and we were speculating that we'd see an improvement of, oh, 30 seconds to a minute off the build times of the old Maudslay?!
So the moral of the story is upgrade your hard drives and run Linux!
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