Dreamhost’s upgrades Monday night did nothing - initially, the results were promising, but they unfortunately did not last in the long run. Cisco could not even determine the problem, so Dreamhost has ordered brand new routers that boast about 8x the power of their current ones.

Dreamhost sums it up this way, and it puts a lot of fears to rest about server stability:

“Just to get everybody on the same page.. essentially ALL performance and stability problems experienced over the last months have been due to these internal network problems. High web and mail server loads are due to the lag they’re getting when NFS mounting the file system from our file servers. This causes slow/flakey performance across the board. It’s actually not a matter of overloaded servers or anything like that, it’s all this very weird network problem that has had us and Cisco stumped.”

So, they’re going to be performing this upgrade tonight at 1 AM EST. The server will be down for awhile then, but after everything gets re-cached, all these slowness and downtime problems we’ve had should be solved.