126 Reply by Wim Leers

(15 replies, posted in News)

BigBrit wrote:

When a new post was on the screen I would click on the name of the person who had posted and wait at least 10 seconds.

i.e.  Today 05:20:26 by Bâshrat the Sneaky

When submitting a reply 30 seconds was not unusual.

Not now, almost instant.

Stu

Ok, that was something I only did *very* rarely smile I think it's slower because it's not cached/optimized as heavily as the rest, because, well, it's expected to be used less smile Anyway, it's good that it's instantaneous, and it's expected. The server is only running at 3% load, it's *that* much more powerful! smile

Go to forum: News

127 Reply by Wim Leers

(15 replies, posted in News)

BigBrit wrote:

The difference is like night and day.

I used to wait 10-15 seconds for a page to change, now it's instant.

Way to go.

Stu

Wow, I almost never had that slow pageloads… But still painfully slow and *especially* very unreliable, so it's still a major improvement smile

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128 Reply by Wim Leers

(15 replies, posted in News)

Yep, and is it fast or what? smile

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129 Reply by Wim Leers

(15 replies, posted in News)

LOL Helmi tongue And no, I'm not a part-time journalist smile My writing isn't that bad when I pay attention to it, but nowhere near as good to qualify for a journalist smile

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130 Reply by Wim Leers

(15 replies, posted in News)

It's not yet on the new server, I just wrote this already wink You're not supposed to have read this yet tongue

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131 Topic by Wim Leers

(15 replies, posted in News)

If you see this message, you're browsing DriverPacks.net on its new server!

My thanks go to warp.be, without whose help this move wouldn't have been as smooth by far. If you need managed hosting services with a human face, that is, actually get support when you need it, on the phone, via chat or e-mail, instead of endless waiting on a reply to your e-mail, consider it smile

Go to forum: News

132 Topic by Wim Leers

(5 replies, posted in News)

Sunday, between 20:00 and 20:30 GMT+1 (Belgium/Netherlands), that is 14:00-15:00 GMT-5 (New York), I'll be moving the main site, the forum and the bugtracker to the new server.

No big problems are expected, a trial run has been made and it's running perfectly there already.

UPDATE:
Due to my own stupidity, this has to be postponed. I didn't point the DriverPacks DNS records to the new name servers yet! By doing that now, we can make the move extremely smooth this Sunday.
We had a practice round today, so now I know it can all be done in about 30 minutes smile

Go to forum: News

133 Reply by Wim Leers

(14 replies, posted in News)

Helmi: actually, it is an open source project, I just never have gotten to the point to make the source widely available. The reasons? Lack of time and lack of interest. Only once every couple of months people here ask for the source. The DriverPacks attract sysadmins, not coders.

Go to forum: News

134 Reply by Wim Leers

(14 replies, posted in News)

mr_smartepants wrote:

Sounds great!
Now how about some extra storage space for the nightlies? smile
I had to throw out some older nightlies to make space for the newer uploads.  "Disk Quota exceeded" errors all over the place.

Welcome back Boss! smile

Size limit doubled! smile

Go to forum: News

135 Reply by Wim Leers

(14 replies, posted in News)

newsposter wrote:

Bashrat, have you also though about approaching mirrors.tds.net (Madison, WI, USA) about some mirror space?  They mirror a pile of Linux distros as well as OpenOffice as a 'public service' with loads of bandwidth.

That means extra work to keep it in sync. So, I won't even consider it.

This works extremely well, all over the world, and requires zero extra effort. What more could I want? smile

Go to forum: News

136 Topic by Wim Leers

(14 replies, posted in News)

Our downloads had been either slow or excruciatingly slow (speeds varying between 15 and 100 KBps) for at least a year. DreamHost is not just bad, but they're liars too. They promised multiple terabytes per month of bandwidth (a multitude of the 1.2-2 terabytes we were consuming), but they could not deliver that. At some points, they just stopped our downloads, because their servers couldn't pull it off. Essentially, they broke their contract. So a new solution was definitely needed.

On April 24, I was pointed to a new Content Delivery Network service: SimpleCDN. Normally, such a service is not affordable for an open source project. But this seemed to be, because of their unique approach: Pay Per File. You only pay once per file. No matter how many times it's downloaded.
That was exactly what we needed!

I just tested it while writing this post: I'm getting 1.4 MB/sec. I downloaded DriverPack Graphics A 8.04, 84.8 MB in 1:04. That's 1.325 MB/sec on average. Not bad. Not bad at all! While I was downloading it, there were 10 other concurrent downloads, whom had, I'm sure, similar speeds. Now that's no longer "not bad" but "pretty amazing".

Thanks to this massively improved download setup, the number of downloads has grown exponentially. Since April 24, there have been 2,864,350 downloads, worth 124,350.16 GB in traffic! That's more than 32,000 downloads per day, more than 1300 per hour, more than 22 per minute and more than 1 every 3 seconds. Or, in traffic: more than 1.4 TB per day, more than 58 GB per hour, or an average of more than 16 MB/sec!
That's nothing short of astonishing. It also is a pretty good indicator of how popular DriverPacks.net is smile


So, if you're looking for a CDN, go to http://simplecdn.com. Mention you found them via DriverPacks.net. Not because DriverPacks.net would get some money thanks to an affiliate reward system. But simply to thank them: SimpleCDN is sponsoring all downloads of DriverPacks.net!

Thanks SimpleCDN. I don't know what we'd be doing without you!

Go to forum: News

137 Reply by Wim Leers

(11 replies, posted in DriverPack LAN)

Nope, those three can not be googlized by design. Google doesn't spider us very couple of minutes, which is what would be necessary.

Go to forum: DriverPack LAN

138 Reply by Wim Leers

(6 replies, posted in Site & Forum Issues And Feedback)

I should have been more communicative about this, but I'm in serious lack of time. 3 big projects (Sudoku app in C++/Qt, OpenGL app, Java/JSP/Google Maps/Youtube/etc. web app) for school, all due next week. Been programming 10 hours/day, 7/7 (on average)
for many weeks.

I'll re-enable search.php. I disabled it because it's a big mess and does too many things: I just want to disable the actual searching on keywords, not the other stuff, but this was the only way I could get that done fast.

Go to forum: Site & Forum Issues And Feedback

139 Reply by Wim Leers

(6 replies, posted in Feedback and Support - DriverPacks Base)

This was probably due to a badly synced file (i.e. not your bad, but my bad). It should be working just fine now.

Go to forum: Feedback and Support - DriverPacks Base

140 Reply by Wim Leers

(14 replies, posted in Feedback and Support - DriverPacks Base)

Excellent. I'll try to make real improvements to the download system this weekend.

Go to forum: Feedback and Support - DriverPacks Base

141 Reply by Wim Leers

(10 replies, posted in Other)

Oh, right. You can e-mail me at admin {at} driverpacks.net

Go to forum: Other

142 Reply by Wim Leers

(41 replies, posted in Other)

I've accepted jpgingras' kind offer as a temporary solution. All DriverPacks are currently being served from his server.

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143 Reply by Wim Leers

(10 replies, posted in Other)

Yep, it's like josste describes. Only I'm doing it in a .htaccess file. If you drop me an e-mail, I'll send you my current .htaccess file.

Go to forum: Other

144 Reply by Wim Leers

(41 replies, posted in Other)

Hey guys,

OverFlow e-mailed me. This is what I answered.

me wrote:

I'm actually on a vacation atm. And I was out to a party during the time that you sent me those two e-mails. DreamHost has throttled that domain, I can't enable it again. I'm talking to DreamHost right now.

So stay tuned.

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145 Reply by Wim Leers

(76 replies, posted in News)

You were unable to commit it? It's absolutely *crucial* that the SVN is up-to-date!

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146 Reply by Wim Leers

(12 replies, posted in Feedback and Support - DriverPacks Base)

It's counting dynamically, but for some mysterious reason I let it count the BASE too tongue That's number 11 wink Fixed now!

P.S.: congrats, nobody noticed it in >1 year smile

Go to forum: Feedback and Support - DriverPacks Base

147 Reply by Wim Leers

(12 replies, posted in DriverPack Mass Storage)

What *exactly* is left behind then? I used it to clean the source plenty of times, and it never failed on me.

Go to forum: DriverPack Mass Storage

148 Reply by Wim Leers

(76 replies, posted in News)

Excellent work Jeff smile Any reason why you can't auto-detect the proxy settings from IE's settings?

; Use IE defaults for proxy
HttpSetProxy(0)

Source: http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/doc … tProxy.htm

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149 Reply by Wim Leers

(5 replies, posted in News)

No, the CDN will only be used to speed up the website itself. For file distribution, Amazon S3 will probably be used, taking advantage of its built-in Bittorrent support. At least individual drivers will be. I may consider a different strategy for DriverPacks though. But "DriverPacks" will have a different meaning by then: it will be an automatically packaged set of drivers. Updates will be granular, thus require virtually no bandwidth, thanks to the DriverDB (which will be served from Amazon S3, as mentioned before).

Thanks again for your offer though. I will keep it in mind.

Go to forum: News

150 Topic by Wim Leers

(5 replies, posted in News)

I'm waiting for Drupal 6. There, I said it. Too many things that will be Drupal 6 only, which I can no longer ignore. In particular, the Views module, which is a query builder, is something I will *need* for the API. Views 2, which will be for Drupal 6 only, has the ability to have a different "root table" than the currently hard-coded "node" table (in which Drupal stores all basic info for each content type, like the title, author and body).

In the mean time, I'm improving what I've already built. In particular, my Hierarchical Select module has been rewritten to allow multiple selection (I'll post a demo later). This is something that will be greatly appreciated by you, I'm sure smile I've updated my Tabs panel style plugin for the Panels 2 module, which will definitely be used to be able to rapidly rearrange content on DriverPacks.net. In practice, this means we don't have to rewrite XHTML or CSS to change the lay-out or add new pages whenever necessary.
Today, I've finished my CDN integration module. A CDN is a Content Delivery Network. It's basically static file servers on steroids: they have servers all over the planet and allow super fast downloads. This means the next DriverPacks.net will load superfast, wherever you're living on this planet!

Drupal 6 will be released somewhere in the next month probably. Views 2 should be too. During that time, I will start porting my modules to Drupal 6.

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