Over the past month Axel and I have been secretly working away on a side project to upgrade and improve our file server infrastructure, primarily to make us future proof and increase the storage capacity of all our file servers, but also to ensure we have more than enough bandwidth to go around.

If you're particularly astute, you may have noticed that some servers have gone missing from the server selection window for days or even weeks at a time, and new servers have cropped up (for instance we now have 2 servers in Washington DC, and 2 servers in London). We've been taking down servers for upgrades and putting up new ones to bolster the ranks. And the reason? We're now pushing over 1.8Gbit of traffic a second across our network. Here's some maths:

1.8Gbit a second = 230 MegaBytes a second
230MB x 60 = 13.8 GigaBytes a minute
12.8GB x 60 = 828GB an hour
828GB x 24 = 19.9 TeraBytes a day
19.9TB x 30 = 597TB a month

Impressive stuff.

Our upgrades are now complete and a direct result of these upgrades is that I am going to be doubling the speed cap on downloads for normal members from 500kb/sec to 1MB/sec. This will apply to both "manual" downloads and downloads through the Nexus Mod Manager. Expect this to happen some time next week.

We're very close to announcing the new site code going in to beta (any hour/day now!), which is something I've alluded to recently in the news and my recent State of the Union video blog. The beta and subsequent roll-out of this code is the spring-board for us to roll out a host of additional features and upgrades for the sites, so this is a really exciting time for us.

Axel is currently working on a new download mechanism for manual downloads that will do away with the server selection window and provide you with the best file server for downloading at the time. It should save you a few clicks and a bit of waiting around for your download to start. But more on that later.

Keep your eye out for the beta announcement as we're hoping as many of your as possible will take some time out of your busy schedule to make sure the sites are as bug free as possible before we go live. I want no complaints if we roll out the new code and things you use are broken because you didn't help us beta test!