As we announced on the dashboard, on Friday around 1 AM we moved WordPress.com to a new datacenter and a new set of servers. A month or so ago a similar transition didn’t go so well so we tested things very heavily before the change and thanks to the hard work of Donncha and Ryan the move went without a hitch with only a few minutes of downtime.
Since the move we’ve been watching things very closely and there have been a few hiccups with the new database machine which may have manifested itself in strange redirects every now and then, however you shouldn’t see these any more.
We’ve also been using the LiteSpeed web server with a lot of success but there was a hidden bug with the way PHP interacts with the headers that was causing problems for some user agents, we’ve put in a temporary workaround and we’re in touch with the LiteSpeed developers about a more permanent fix.
For server geeks following along at home, we’ve tripled the number of processors serving WordPress.com and we’ve only lit up a quarter of the hardware that’s been set up in the new datacenter, so capacity is not going to be a problem for a long time. I’ve also been coding up caching for some of the most common functions so you should notice things getting faster and faster this week.
3 responses so far ↓
Britta // October 31, 2005 at 2:08 pm
Hi Matt,
is wordpress.com at the San Diego datacenter of TextDrive?
I’ve got a hosting account there, too, and the connection to my account/site (I’m in NZ) is fast as blazes for me.
But wordpress.com still runs a bit sluggishly for me … so I’m looking forward to the “faster and faster”.
Redirects are working OK now, as of this morning (NZ time).
Ryan // November 11, 2005 at 5:05 pm
:~ admin$ host wordpress.com
wordpress.com has address 207.7.108.235
:~ admin$ whois 207.7.108.235
NEXTLEVEL INTERNET, INC. NEXTLVL-ARIN-002 (NET-207-7-96-0-1)
207.7.96.0 - 207.7.111.255
TextDrive, Inc. NEXTLVL-046-TEXTDRV-1 (NET-207-7-108-0-1)
207.7.108.0 - 207.7.108.255
# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2005-11-10 19:10
# Enter ? for additional hints on searching ARIN’s WHOIS database.
Matt on WordPress » Scoble Sucks (and WordPress RSS) // March 2, 2006 at 3:28 pm
[...] I suspect that two things happened, one might have been a server glitch related to the datacenter move on Friday/Saturday that caused errors in the way headers were sent. In that case I apologize and the problem has been fixed. The other confusion is probably related to aggregators that read the description element but ignore content:encoded. Now I must admit here I can’t find an aggregator that does that, and if you read the comments on Scoble’s entry it’s a bunch of people saying it works fine for them. In every aggregator I have access to — Bloglines, FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, Newsgator, Onfolio, Rojo, FeedLounge — everything works fine, but we can’t test everything so if anyone finds an aggregator it doesn’t work please let me know and I’ll look into it. Though I can fix WP.com immediately, there are still 700,000+ copies of WordPress somewhere that the aggregator developer will probably want to be compatible with. [...]
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