Synopsis: Phoenyx.net gets a hardware upgrade. About two hours downtime tomorrow afternoon. You don't need to understand any of the geekspeak that follows, but I provide it for those who are interested. Phoenyx.net currently runs on a 486/133 with 32M of RAM. Earlier this week I cashed in our change jar and purchased a AMD K6-2 (P-II class) with 64M of SDRAM and a 100 MHz bus motherboard (just about overkill for this application). I hope to swap these out tomorrow afternoon, which will result in at least an hour of downtime, maybe two. Currently we're running about 50M of RAM in use when at our peak usage, which means we use a *lot* of disk swap when things get heavy and that slows the system down even further. The new 64M should keep us from going to disk which will improve performance. The much faster processor, more cache, very fast (6ns) SDRAM, and 100 MHz bus will go far toward improving performance and allow us to implement some features that we felt wouldn't do well under the 486. The place you're going to see this most is in running web forms... you should see results back from those a lot faster as it takes less time to spawn and execute the CGI process. The two places we're still bottlenecked is our pipe, a 33.6k modem, and the disk, which is an EIDE. The new board supports UDMA-66 EIDE drives, and I think the drive in that box is UDMA-33... if it is, disk performance will increase somewhat. I'll have to track down the documentation and check. If anybody would like to donate a fast SCSI adapter and/or drives to Phoenyx.net, we'd be happy to take it off your hands. The pipe isn't going to change any time soon... it's already $180 a month, ISDN is $360, and cable or DSL aren't options around here. (We have them, they don't support servers.) We're finding the modem's quite adequate for mail traffic and the web pages aren't bad unless they have a lot of graphics or large graphics. (What we're doing on our own pages for graphics is putting them on our personal sites on the upstream provider and using a server-side configuration that automatically redirects any requests on the graphics directory to the faster upstream site, so we never transfer those graphics over our modem.) -- Carl D Cravens (raven@phoenyx.net) Don't bother pressing that key, there is no Esc. -- -------------------------------------------------------------- Listowner tools are found at http://www.phoenyx.net/listowners
