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Alpha Anywhere and Zebrahost - Extremely Stable Plaform Now.

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    Alpha Anywhere and Zebrahost - Extremely Stable Plaform Now.

    Hi Everyone,

    I know this comes up from time to time about the stability of Alpha Five for large applications, and there may have been some concerns in the past but I can say that version 12 (Alpha Anywhere) combined with Zebrahost's expertise in setting up the architecture results in a very stable platform.

    Out of habit, I restart my WAS servers every night using Always Up, but I just let them run for two weeks straight on Alpha Anywhere without any issue. There was no memory creep and it was completely rocksolid. My application (touch wood) has been running beautifully.

    One big tip is if you're going to to use a load balancer for a large application and you need SSL then put the SSL on the load balancer and not the individual WAS servers. Seems to improve performance a bit. Clive and Jason at Zebrahost know how to set this up.

    This was an unsolicited opinion, but I just wanted to pass along my kudos because it really is a solidly built web application server now.

    Cheers,

    Scott

    #2
    Re: Alpha Anywhere and Zebrahost - Extremely Stable Plaform Now.

    Thanks for the update Scott. This is very encouraging. I am using Microsoft Network Load Balancing which is software based. Because we do not have a dedicated hardware appliance to do the load balancing, we have no choice but to use the WAS for SSL. We initially had issues with SSL prior to the last major release. Since installing the release, we have not experienced any more problems.

    Please keep us posted with your progress and any new developments.

    Comment


      #3
      Re: Alpha Anywhere and Zebrahost - Extremely Stable Plaform Now.

      Hey Dave,

      With regards to SSl and the load balancer, we used to have that issue since we use a software load balancer as well. But Clive and Jason have figured out a way to add the SSL to a software load balancer (not sure which product) which is pretty sweet since you don't have to shell out for a hardware SSL loadbalancer.

      We found moving the SSL off the WAS is really good for performance.

      Cheers,

      Scott

      Scott

      Comment


        #4
        Re: Alpha Anywhere and Zebrahost - Extremely Stable Plaform Now.

        We have switched to Rackspace and are VERY satisfied with it. Unbelievable service.
        Reed Brown
        ITOT Solutions, Inc.
        Alpha v12

        Comment


          #5
          Re: Alpha Anywhere and Zebrahost - Extremely Stable Plaform Now.

          Originally posted by DaveF View Post
          Thanks for the update Scott. This is very encouraging. I am using Microsoft Network Load Balancing which is software based. Because we do not have a dedicated hardware appliance to do the load balancing, we have no choice but to use the WAS for SSL. We initially had issues with SSL prior to the last major release. Since installing the release, we have not experienced any more problems.
          We are looking at using Microsoft Network Load Balancing for our environment, as well. Do you have, or know of any sites with, good instructions for setting up MS NLB? Are the any special considerations, for using with Alpha that we should be aware of? TIA

          Comment


            #6
            Re: Alpha Anywhere and Zebrahost - Extremely Stable Plaform Now.

            Interesting. I just switched off of Rackspace because I was paying twice the price for slower servers.

            Comment


              #7
              Re: Alpha Anywhere and Zebrahost - Extremely Stable Plaform Now.

              parkjammer - what are you using now? Thanks.

              Comment


                #8
                Re: Alpha Anywhere and Zebrahost - Extremely Stable Plaform Now.

                I had used a rackspace virtual server to host both Oracle and related software along with Alpha. I was spending $300+/mo for a server with only one apparent virtual processor and 4GB of RAM. However, the server was underperforming (by an order of magnitude) what my most basic laptops would do. Note: this is with Oracle and all other load-generating software disabled.

                I had been introduced to the ZebraHost folks at the Spring Alpha conference in the Boston area... so I checked it out. Even the most basic Zebrahost setup was 8x faster in generating Alpha responses (for $40/mo). After that test I upped the Zebrahost system to a mid-range status. It is working fine. I was pretty worried... had I released even rough beta of the app-suite I'm building on the Rackspace system it would have ground to a halt.

                I haven't even begun to tune the UX elements or the database and my Zebrahost system runs about 12x faster (at UX load/response times) than it did previously.

                Comment


                  #9
                  Re: Alpha Anywhere and Zebrahost - Extremely Stable Plaform Now.

                  Thanks!
                  Question: Do you see the blank screen for few seconds (2 to 15) between the splash screen and the actual application display on mobile device (assuming you are also using for mobile) when using Rackspace or now with Zebra? May be it is the issue with the way the particular alpha application is designed by a programmer (that is me) and not the issue with the hosting server. I have this issue and trying to fix.

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Re: Alpha Anywhere and Zebrahost - Extremely Stable Plaform Now.

                    Hmmm.

                    My situation may not be comparable insofar as I'm not in live/released mode
                    and so haven't tuned for final use. I just made it work end-to-end so that
                    I could prove to myself that everything would work... and since then I've
                    been working on the app on the back end.

                    I have found this:
                    • When I hit my site with a browser (a site... pages, GRIDs, images, etc) it response reasonably. Not the fastest... but not the slowest. Comparing to CMS systems like Joomla and Drupal.
                    • When I launch the mobile portion of my site from either a mobile device or browser, response is slow. It takes a while to load the UX components.
                    • However, part of this can be mitigated on the mobile-device side by putting some intial content into the PhoneGap compilation (an initial splash screen and/or buttons which are instant because they are on the device). Then you can load the additional UX components in the background or as they are selected.
                    • There are some notes here on the forum about UX tuning or UX load speed... saw a decent one the other day.
                    • And so... if I use a basic PhoneGap app and have a delay on the intial UX component (if I choose a complex/large one) then yes, there is a black-screen for a few seconds before initial loading of the first UX.
                    • It appears simply as a "waiting" spinner on a browser.
                    • And... I expect to mitigate this highly when I turn my attention to tuning the UX and queries just before beta launch (later this month).



                    Not sure if that helps. Just my two cents worth.

                    Comment


                      #11
                      Re: Alpha Anywhere and Zebrahost - Extremely Stable Plaform Now.

                      Just wanted to put in my two cents for ZebraHost. Have not tried any others. Thought about it but I had an issue come up recently on which I left a message at Zebra. After it was resolved, Clive called me on the WEEKEND to make sure everything was OK. I was sold. (On a migration issue, Jason was awesome too). Though I have nothing to compare it to, everyone is way impressed with the speed of the application.

                      Comment


                        #12
                        Re: Alpha Anywhere and Zebrahost - Extremely Stable Plaform Now.

                        We appreciate the positive comments. Reed switched from us several years ago following an unfortunate outage. (I would have done the same) Since then we have gained a lot more experience and are continually working to improve our service and equipment. Our support team is growing and we will be upgrading our older Hyper-V nodes starting January in the Dallas datacenter. The new nodes will feature Intel DecaCore 3GHz processors.
                        Affordable Alpha Five, PHP, MySQL Hosting.
                        Serving Webmasters since 2000.ZebraHost

                        Comment


                          #13
                          Re: Alpha Anywhere and Zebrahost - Extremely Stable Plaform Now.

                          Allan, Thanks for the response. I will use the idea of initial screen with some buttons [example may be: login/skip login] before displaying the UX component.

                          Comment


                            #14
                            Re: Alpha Anywhere and Zebrahost - Extremely Stable Plaform Now.

                            Just a quick note about Alpha web server and SSL, they used to have some minor issues that would cause applications running on SSL to slow down and even crash, they have fixed a lot of performance issues and the stability of the web server is much better than ever before.

                            I am hosting my application on a private virtual server since I am very comfortable managing my servers and all issues I had with the Alpha web server and SSL were basically due to hidden and difficult to duplicate bugs which once they were identify in a very long process, has been addressed and fixed.

                            I still use AlwaysUp to reboot the Alpha web server daily at 4:00am just to be on a safe side. I am still running pre-release version 1755-4215 which I will upgrade soon to a recent one that has some enhancements I need, but now I feel a bit more confident the Alpha web server is more stable than ever before, at least in my case.
                            Edhy Rijo
                            Progytech
                            (Computer Consultants)
                            The makers of CardTracking.Net
                            www.progytech.com

                            Comment


                              #15
                              Re: Alpha Anywhere and Zebrahost - Extremely Stable Plaform Now.

                              Zebra host all the way I have 3 servers that range in size from a hyper v to a dedicated server on RAID SSD drives that manages a good size site with a ton of data. Reasonably priced and service to boot. pun intended
                              Chad Brown

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