New Foswiki server

When Foswiki emerged from the ashes of the TW*ki (TM) project, server infrastructure was needed in a hurry. At that time, I happened to have available a brand new server. Bought by a customer, but no immediate deployment plans. Foswiki.org lived happily on that server for months. However, recently the server was reclaimed by the customer and foswiki.org had to move. This weekend I configured and installed the new server, and I must say: i'm happy with the result.

Although providing less CPU power (a quad core Xeon CPU at 2.00GHz), the new server surpasses the previous one on disk-I/O: with 4 250GB 7200RPM SATA-II disks each with 8MB cache, a RAID 1+0 setup gives us 500GB of fast storage. The decrease in CPU power is insignificant against this improvement in I/O-throughput; foswiki is I/O-bound in nature, not CPU-bound. This also goes for the subversion repository. By the way, the server has 6GB of memory.

The new server was paid for by my company, Sonologic. I hope to recover some of the investment by donations from the community, and so far 5 people have pledged an amount already (covering about a third of the cost). Colocation and bandwidth is provided free of charge to the project.

The server capacity more than suffices for the task at hand (hosting foswiki.org and the subversion repository), but plans are in place to distribute the load among multiple servers. On the one hand we want to distribute web page requests for the wiki geographically, with multiple servers distributed around the globe. On the other hand, whereas now all services run on one server, in the future (near-future I hope) this might prove to be too much. At that point, we will have to move the subversion repository, for example, to another server.

But that is all in the future. For now, the Foswiki community can be happy with having their own server. I want to thank the govcom.org foundation for hosting the Foswiki community up until now, giving us time to sort things out!