There had been two short service interruptions to the HKU web server (www.hku.hk) and proxy server scheduled at the beginning of July and in mid-July. In those 2 weeks between the two scheduled service interruptions, we worked on a major upgrade of our web server and proxy server to improve their capacities and  performance.

The web server (www.hku.hk) was a SUN Enterprise E2000 system before the upgrade . With the exponential growth of network activities in the University in recent years, the performance of the SUN E2000 server has become inadequate to cope with the ever increasing demand for access to the HKU network and the Internet. In order to improve the performance of our web server, we have re-deployed a more powerful SUN Enterprise 6000 server with 8 processors (the previous HKUSUB system) to serve as our web server.

For the proxy server which is a SUN Enterprise E6000 system, we have upgraded it with additional disk storage space. As a result, there is more disk space for the web cache which is a key factor in the performance of the proxy server. The cache is a place to store webpages from the Internet.

Since the successful upgrade of these two computers, the performance of our web server and proxy server has notably been improved and our users should feel the speed-up in response of their web surfing through the University Campus Network.

Kenneth Yip
Tel: 2859 7973
Email: kkyyip@hkusua.hku.hk