We're bringing its memory up from 512 MB to 1024 MB, adding another two drives (10,000 rpm, 18 gig) to the existing 7,200 rpm 9 gig set and 18 gig set., upgrading glibc, and rebuilding the kernel.
All of this will make for a much speedier LiveJournal.
<geek>Memory obviously helps... more of the database can be in memory without going to the disks. New disks will help, not because we're out of space, but because they're too busy reading and writing now... spreading the tables out among different disks increases throughput. The new glibc and new kernel is for large file support (files over 2G) ... yes, we run Linux on the database, not freebsd.</geek>
However, we don't plan to keep this machine as our database for much longer.... we've made plans to purchase a new database server but first we need to come up with $21,000 ... we already have $10,000 or so available. We're going to have a fund raiser shortly here to raise the other $10k.... more on that later. Once we get the new database server the current one (which we're upgrading tonight) will become the photo gallery server. Users will be able to upload their photo albums and have automatic thumbnail galleries and such, integrated (or not integrated) with other LiveJournal features.
But I'm rambling. Just letting everybody know the site will be down tonight. Embedded journals will just show up blank, and all other journals will have a "Down for maintenance message".
Mad props to evan and dormando for staying up with me tonight to do this.
It shouldn't take a whole hour.... we've researched every step of the upgrade pretty well, so it should be pretty painless. I'll update when we're done.