New Datacenter and Caching

As we announced on the dashboard, on Friday around 1 AM we moved WordPress.com to a new datacenter and a new set of servers. A month or so ago a similar transition didn’t go so well so we tested things very heavily before the change and thanks to the hard work of Donncha and Ryan the move went without a hitch with only a few minutes of downtime.

Since the move we’ve been watching things very closely and there have been a few hiccups with the new database machine which may have manifested itself in strange redirects every now and then, however you shouldn’t see these any more.

We’ve also been using the LiteSpeed web server with a lot of success but there was a hidden bug with the way PHP interacts with the headers that was causing problems for some user agents, we’ve put in a temporary workaround and we’re in touch with the LiteSpeed developers about a more permanent fix.

For server geeks following along at home, we’ve tripled the number of processors serving WordPress.com and we’ve only lit up a quarter of the hardware that’s been set up in the new datacenter, so capacity is not going to be a problem for a long time. I’ve also been coding up caching for some of the most common functions so you should notice things getting faster and faster this week.