Weekend Notes from Reclaim Cloud: Anth101, downsizing bava, and back to MyISAM

I spent some time Saturday and Sunday playing around with the Reclaim Cloud, I am spending more and more time in this environment, and loving it. Couple of  notes here given I am prone to forget.

I moved the impressive Anth101 from a managed server into the cloud this weekend on a scalable WordPress instance. That site runs really lean now, so it is a perfect fit. This was not a clustered WordPress site, and so far it is using 3 cloudlets—which would roughly work out to $9 a month. A world of difference from managed hosting 🙂

After moving Anth101 I got the idea that perhaps this blog could be put on a similar non-clustered WordPress instance. The difference would be roughly 1/3 the number of resources/cloudlets (roughly 8 versus 24 being used in the clustered environment), which would translate into significant monthly savings. So, I gave it a shot put was running into issues with rsyncing between containers, which was a permissions key issue on my end. I documented it in the Reclaim community forums, but one thing I realized as a result is that you can mount file systems from another Network File System (NFS) container in a different environment, which is pretty slick. I tried that (you can see details in forum thread linked above) and was able to easily copy everything from the old wp-content directory over to the new instance after mounting it. So, this blog is running in a new WordPress environment on the Reclaim Cloud, and we’ll see if there is a noticeable difference in load and resources demands.

Finally, I already wrote about switching the database type on this blog and ds106 from MyISAM to InnoDB. There were no perceivable performance issues on this blog, but when I switched types for  ds106 (a WordPress Multisite instance) the database resource usage on that cluster went through the roof. I had time this weekend to try switching the database type back to MyISAM on ds106, and the resource usage dropped. So it was definitely an issue with the database type. The whole reason I did this in the first place was because the Galera Cluster that syncs the multiple databases in that environment only works with the InnoDB type. And if InnoDB is no longer running on ds106, I may have to switch it back to a non-clustered WordPress instance as well. There is a theme here, a clustered setup may be overkill for my modest web life. The real beauty of switching database types, however, was the cloning tool in Reclaim Cloud. I could take an entire snapshot of the ds106 stack, change database types, test that it worked, and then point DNS to watch load. It was super simple, and I could always switch back to the previous environment if need be during testing.

Anyway, it felt good to spend some time in the Clouds this weekend given our public beta starts Wednesday, I am starting to feel more and more comfortable in the environment, and I am ever more impressed with the options and flexibility it provides.

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3 Responses to Weekend Notes from Reclaim Cloud: Anth101, downsizing bava, and back to MyISAM

  1. John says:

    Hi Jim,
    Reading your post about cloud with interest, exciting times. The site feels really snappy, pages load really fast here. I do notice your menu links seem to have gone west though…

    • John says:

      & posting a comment went to a blank page, although the comment got through!

      • Reverend says:

        And now I know comments are working, page menu issues was a bad find and replace I did across database, just fixed that.

        Glad to hear it is still snappy, and I do think you are going to really enjoy the Cloud! Just a few short days for you 🙂

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