Page History

...

The OpenOffice.org Community forums are hosted under the domain http://user.services.openoffice.org/ and comprise 9 National Language (NL) forums: Chinese, Dutch, English, French, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Spanish and Vietnamese. A total of 15 language packs are supported across the 9 NL forums, (the 9 main language plus 6 other major language variants). Across all forums there are some 75,000 registered members, who have created 300,000 posts on 78,000 topics. A typical usage is ~200,000 page requests/day, with another ~800,000 image, CSS images and other furniture resources needed to load these pages.

The forums are currently implemented in phpBB at version 3.0.8 running on Solaris Coolstack on a 4 core Solaris zone in the Oracle Germany data centre Hamburg machine room (at an average 3-8% us+sy load). PhpBB only requires phpBB works on a standard LAMP stack. Also note , and the the test and development systems, which shadows of the production system, are currently implemented on an Ubuntu 10.04 LTS VM running a standard Ubuntu server minimal LAMP configuration. The phpBB application uses both a file system and D/B (currently MySQL) to maintain application data. These are currently some 2.5GiB and 1.5GiB in raw size.

The phpBB application forum software has a number of special-to-OOo modifications, and the process for carrying these forward over phpBB upgrade has now been refined over 5 phpBB application version upgrades. The configuration also include includes a number of custom scripts which will require some rework for an Apache.org environment and to comply with Apache SysOps and Security Standards.

...

• The configuration is largely build on a phpBB build. This is currently at version 3.0.8. This one behind current, but upgrade to 3.0.9 was deferred in view of the pending relocation to Apache Infrastructure, and will be integrating into migration.

• Due to architectural limitations in phpBB, the 9 forums are implemented as 9 separate logical systems each with its own directory hierarchy for code and application data and its own schema within MySQL. However, since the 3.0.4 upgrade, all NL-forum-specific mods have been merged into a single common code base, and with each forum is symlinked back to a version specific directory within /var/lib/phpBB. This is mainly for manageability, but this also has a performance dividend as the APC opcode cache resolves all 9 copies of each php module back to its real file-name and thus shares the same cache space.

• Within /var/lib/phpBB two directories are maintained for each phpBB version: refXYY and comXYY, where XYY is the phpBB version number. refXXY contains the unpacked "out-of-box" kits as downloaded from the phpBB website, and comXYY the site-specific version which is symlinked into the live hierarchy. The site-specific version is generated by a patch file on the refXYY version. This file is the key customisation configuration item (CI) currently comprising some 990 line (currently ~990 lines) which must be regressed across each phpBB version upgrade. This For each phpBB version upgrade, this patch file is regressed / refined / retest retested on a dev VM off production and , then a new pair of directory hierarchies is installed on prod prior to cut-over of each upgrade.

• The Apache and MySQL configurations are tuned to this application and transaction rate, but this tuning is pretty standard. Nothing esoteric.

• The configuration also contains a management account use to implement a number of batch script to support the release process and routine D/B and file-system housekeeping / monitoring and to implement a mailbox to request forum posting system. The goal here in doing this was to ensure that the application and system could run "zero-admin" between upgrades.

...

• A hot-copy backup of the DB is currently taken nightly to allow the Datacentre backup system to backup a consistent dataset. A typical daily/weekly/monthly copy of these backup sets and Apache log logs are also maintained online within the file-system. A weekly offsite delta/conpressed compressed copy of the backup is also taken for D/R purposes.

...