We are on Amazon EC2

yiiframework.com is now on Amazon EC2. Please let us know if you encounter any problem with our new server. Thanks.

Good…

@qiang: Any chance to share the topology you’re using? I’m mostly curious of the design in terms of scalability. Have you used any other Amazon services apart from EC2?

Regards,

John

There’s nothing special about this setup. It runs on a single EC2 big instance. I haven’t thought about scalability of it because the instance can handle the workload easily.

Have you made changes on this server to fix the search timeout issue?

The search issue was caused by overload of the old server… it was fixed temporarily by adding more memory but still sometimes there was the need for the second click to get the results because of timeouts… but now on the new server all should be fine…

Sounds like a plan, although if its still a issue you might want to look into my suggestion I made before about installing sphinx to handle the searching and indexing of the db.

Thanks everyone. Great job! :D

The site comes up really quickly, it is very snappy now.

Search also works really well, every time I’ve tried and is super fast.

For reference how much memory did the previous server have that was not enough?

At first there was 2GB… but the system started to swap so Qiang added one more…

now on the new server there are 8GB and currently 3,5 are not used at all :D

Would you recommend Amazon EC2 service? I’m thinking of doing the same in the near future.

Yes, I highly recommend it. It is especially suitable if you have a serious Web-based business and your want scalability as well as reliability. EC2 may not be as cheap as other ISPs, but I think its cost is justified.

I didn’t want to jump the gun, but now I can safely say that it made a big difference!

The Yii site is fast and responsive. Thanks a lot.

It seems like forum notification emails are not working right anymore: I’m not informed about new answers in topics i have posted to anymore. Is there some mail configuration missing?

Mike it should work… I just got the notification for your post…

To see what is going on… check first when you are looking this topic if the button above say "stop watching topic" - that means that you should have got the notification for my post.

If that is OK and you did not get the notification, than it could be that the notification has got "trapped" with some anti spam measure…

Seems to affect only older topics: I got a notification for this topic. But on other ones even though i see a “letter symbol” in the topic list (which usually indicates that i watch this topic), if i click on the topic, there’s a button “Watch topic” now. So some subscriptions seem to get lost over time.

Anyway, not related to EC2…

It’s caused by a forum which automatically prunes subscriptions for old posts. I just cleared this setting so that your subscription will not be pruned.

Thanks Qiang!

Apparently Yiiframework.com is not accessible from Mainland China more often than not since it’s on Amazon EC2, unless using VPN. I am on China Unicom’s ADSL network in Beijing and my friends in other parts of China reported the same problem.

Well, tell your country to wake up and do something about it!

You can’t live behind a great firewall forever.

On http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org one can test whether a site is blocked by the chinese firewall.

Is it possible to have an EC2 instance within china (I believe so)? Maybe that could solve the issue. Though maybe not the best solution. Is there is another option?