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Server Upgrade Woes
While there is an endless list of features to add and bugs to fix, a big item on our to-do list is to upgrade our server software themselves. Currently on Gaia, there are many groups of servers handling different tasks. To name some, we have:
- Web server group (general web pages)
- Avatar server group (compiling and displaying avatars)
- GSI server group (flash and mobile game interface calls)
- Job server group (all intensive tasks that happen in the background)
- Database server group (where hundreds of hard drives work together to store all data)
- Caching server group (data that's used often are stored in memory farm)
On top of these servers which total to about 100 servers, we also need to maintain our firewall, load balancers, switches, and gateways.
Anyways, back to the task at hand. Today's web servers should be connected through the secure HTTP protocol known as HTTPS. Making this work means we need to upgrade our servers to the latest operating system, and here is where all the fun began.
Upgrading the operating system means that everything else are upgraded at the same time. The fun comes from making sure that all of the nuts and bolts behind Gaia's features would continue working.
The first step was to upgrade the avatar server group, and immediately we found issues where data cache between new servers and the old were not sharing the same data. We've immediately rolled back servers to the older versions and we're back to troubleshooting.
This is just the tip of the iceburg in the whole server upgrade project. Soon we will be upgrading the main web servers, and the amount of issues to fix will be massive. Hope all can be wrapped up by the end of month. sweatdrop
Meanwhile, we've started work on the Christmas event, and the mobile app is moving along. We should have the mobile inventory system should be ready for testing soon!
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