[Act] Act server: state of the situation

[Theo van Hoesel]

Hey Sébastien,

Hop you are all doing well - and 'HAPPY NEW YEAR' to you (i know it's a bit late now)
Sébastien, i am greatly worried about the current state of Act and it's future. North America has stepped away already and some voices in the Perl Conference Amsterdam team are going up and suggest looking at the way Dancer did their stuff.

Please do not let this happen. We all love the features that Act offers and i am very willing to pickup the Act Voyager once things are smooth again. I even had a discussion with a developer willing to try to add another payment gateway, so people have more options to pay (like iDeal in the Netherlands)

I can understand that this is all not primary concern and that priorities and limited resources or other restraints can make progress slow and difficult.

But could you please update me what is holding back, and how we can make improvements in stability.

And where possible, will gladly help to get it all back in a state that is acceptable

Theo


> On 30 Dec 2016, at 00:43, Sébastien Aperghis-Tramoni <sebastien at aperghis.net> wrote:
> 
> Hello all,
> 
> 
> First, sorry, I know I should have made this mail earlier.
> 
> So, here is the current situation with regards to the Act server.
> When spectre suddenly disappeared from the internets, we switched
> over the remaining service to phantom, which has been prepared for
> this since a few months. However, it appears that phantom is way
> too light to handle all the services. As a result, Act is regularly
> crashing, and I now keep a constant eye on the logs, and restart
> it whenever it needs to (3-4 times each day). That's mostly for the
> time being.
> 
> We have decided to rent a bigger server (12 CPU threads, 32 GB RAM),
> with the following plan of actions:
> 
> - make it a host for VMs:
>  - one VM for Act (Varnish, Apache + mod_perl, PostgreSQL)
>  - one VM for the rest (static sites, SVN, Mailman)
> 
> - migrate Act ASAP to its dedicated VM
> - migrate the rest of the services
> - release phantom
> 
> Using VM (Qemu/KVM) will hopefully ease backup & moving the servers
> to a new host, when needed.
> 
> Work has already begun. VMs are already installed. Thanks to a
> friend, I've resolved a network issue I was having with NetFilter.
> I am now preparing the Act VM to run Act (Apache 1.3, mod_perl 1.31,
> Perl 5.8.9 or 5.12.4).
> 
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
> 
> Technical specifications
> ------------------------
> * host server
>  CPU: Xeon D-1531 (6 C / 12T @ 2,2 GHz)
>  RAM: 32 GB DDR4 ECC
>  HD: 2 x 250 GB SSD
>  OS: Debian jessie
> 
> * VM for Act
>  vCPU: 8
>  RAM: 16 GB
>  OS: FreeBSD 11.0
> 
> * VM for the rest
>  vCPU: 2
>  RAM: 4 GB
>  OS: FreeBSD 11.0
> 
> -- 
> Sébastien Aperghis-Tramoni
> 
> Close the world, txEn eht nepO.
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