We need a new infrastructure - you only need "new servers" if you insist on continuing to host all of that relational crap.
A flat file structure [threads stored as 25 or 50 posts per page, in more or less static files on the server] can be served up by essentially worthless hardware [trust me on this - hardware no longer has any value whatsoever].
What we need is:
1) Mirroring in several different physical locations so that the pipe is no longer a non-redundant point of failure which the Nut Roots can choke off at will.I'd leave the current [relational] servers online, in read-only mode, to serve as an archive of older content on Free Republic, and then I'd bring online a new family of flat file servers for the next two months to be able to service what I can guarantee you is going to be an unprecedented level of demand.2) Ditching all of the relational structure and getting back to a simple flat file structure for the next two months.
And I'd ditch every single penny of budget money going into new hardware purchases and target it instead at extra bandwidth for the next two months.
The “pray for my kitty” threads are important. Seriously, those threads help posters who are energetically opposed to each on particular political points, to remember that they’re both human and have some things in common that are important to them and that they agree on. The sense of community that such threads help build, improve the cultural foundations of FR and the overall tone of the discourse here.
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Have tried to warn about that for at least half a year.
I don’t think folks realize the degree of demand.
What’s all this flat-file talk? You lose a lot of good features with that.
Flat files of 50 posts each? What if I do a search of anything? The application is going to have to search through possibly gigabytes of flat files. Relational with indexes and foreign keys does that fast.
Replication by shipping files? If you’re think of a master/slave setup (one server writes and replicates the data to the others, which can be read from), any active thread is going to result in shipping old data. On average, you will ship 1/2 the average file size unnecessarily times the number of active threads. MySQL can be set up so the slaves periodically (even every minute) access the log on the master and read in only the new data.
If you’re thinking of a cluster (all servers reading and writing), forget it with flat files, it’s just not practical.
And most importantly, with flat files you lose enforced data integrity below the application level. It’s dangerous.