Author: murphyslaw4267

The web-server configuration has changed yet again. It used to be highly available with scaling policies and everything but it came at a cost. First of all it carried a price tag, I was using AWS EFS to distribute the files to multiple servers. EFS is a great product but for my use it was also slow. The time to first byte was several seconds. I tried to improve this through memcached and NFS caching utilities but the lowest I got it to was 2.5 seconds to start serving the first byte. Now it is down to half a second and feels much snappier. It is on a single server now with backing EBS as the drive. I’m still running memcached on a seperate instance through AWS’s Elasticache offering. I’m really tempted to stand up an instance on Vultr or Digital Ocean to see how the speeds compare. I will be sure to post the results.

This website is now being hosted on a cluster of servers within AWS. I definitely use this website as an excuse to learn more about infrastructure. I’ll post more about it soon, but currently we are fault tolerant. We are using two EC2 instances running apache, EFS holding the files, and an RDS instance running the database. This is behind an Application Load Balancer and the javascript and pictures are being served over CloudFront. It’s a little slow though for me, I’m trying to figure out why. If you aren’t logged in you’ll have a better experience. I’m gathering metrics on load times to help see what the story is.