A while ago, we got another machine for hosting Alioth and so we started thinking about how to use that machine. It’s a used machine and not massively faster than the current hardware, so just moving everything over wouldn’t actually get us that much of a performance upgrade.
However, Alioth is using FusionForge, which is supposed to be able to run on a cluster of machines. After all, this was originally built for SourceForge.net, which certainly does not run on a single host. So, a split of services is what we’ll do.
This weekend, we’re having a sprint in Collabora’s office in Cambridge, actually implementing the split and doing a bit of general planning for the future.
Last afternoon (Friday), European time, we started the migration. The first step is to move all the data off the Xen guest on wagner, where Alioth is currently hosted. This finished a few minutes ago; it turns out syncing about 8.5 million files across almost 400G of data takes a little while.
The new host is called vasks and will host the database, run the main apache and be the canonical location for the various SCM repositories.
We are not decomissioning wagner, but it’ll be reinstalled without Xen or other virtualisation which should help performance a bit. It’ll host everything that has lower performance requirements such as cron jobs, mailing lists and so on.
I’ll try to keep you all updated and feel free to drop by #alioth on irc.debian.org if you have any questions.