I got all the conversion scripts working well now, and the runtime
down to under 3 hours (it was over 12 when I started!), so I think a
smooth transition will be possible. The code has been running on the
new server for couple of days now and seems fast, but then it has no
load. If someone out there has a good way to stress test it, let me
know.
We've had a great round of QA--lots of testing this last week, and
while I've kept the code semi-frozen I did fix some things that would
have been problems for the live installation, and I've got a good
list of feature requests to work on (though I suspect the first week
or two after installation will be devoted to performance tuning the
server settings with timing data we get from live operation).
Special thanks to Magnus, who did a lot of testing and found some
good stuff.
I still don't have all the images--I'd really like to get all of
those over and installed and tested before I do anything else, but
assuming that goes well, below is my initial idea for a transition
plan. Give me some feedback on it:
1. Set the DNS time-to-live on
www.wikipedia.com to some fairly short
period, like a few hours, soon.
2. Publish the address of the new server for people to test for
another day or two (but not until after I get those images!)
These next steps happen at a chosen low-traffic time of day,
and have to be coordinated well among all of us so they can
be done quickly:
3. Replace the main page of the new server with a "Future home of..."
message, telling users that the wikipedia site will be here in a few
hours after moving servers.
4. Empty the new server database.
5. On the old server, disable the "upload" page, with a message that
the server is being moved.
6. Move all the images over.
7. Mark the rest of the old wiki read-only.
8. Transfer DNS to the new server. This will gradually take effect
for users over the next few hours, so they'll get either the read-
only old server, or the "come back in a few hours" message on the new
server during the move.
8. Dump the old database, copy the dumps to the new server.
9. Run the conversion scripts. This will take 2-3 hours.
10. Replace the main page on the new server with the real wiki code.
Do some sanity testing of all the fetures.
11. Replace the main page of the old server with a "We've moved"
message that points to the new server's IP address.
At that point, we should be live on the new server.
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