| A strange loop.
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| A strange loop.
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SlooooowThis site is run on a lowly 300MHz Pentium II, with 64MB of RAM. All in all, it does a fine job as a mail server and a web server, but it is hitting its limits with MoveableType. Specifically, some of the archives are now large enough that rebuilding them (say, when I make a post in that category) exceeds the memory capacity of the machine. MT's reaction to this situation appears to be to spawn a large number of mt.cgi processes, each floundering in memory-swapping digital hell. A more powerful machine is on the way, but in the meantime, please forgive the occasional tendency of the site to go belly-up for a few minutes.
Posted by Jeff at August 4, 2003 10:41 AM | Link CosmosComputers are cheap now, because of the economy and because they are coming out with new 64-bit processors soon. $400 should let you get a ststem with four times the processor speed and RAM, not to mention a much larger hard drive.
Posted by: Bill Dennis on August 4, 2003 10:59 PMI ended up getting a P3 450 from eBay, with 128MB RAM. With the additional RAM, and the 18GB of SCSI drives transferred from my current server, I should be able to go another few years. Add a bit more RAM for $30, and all will be well. (I only paid $50 for the new server, and that's about what the upgrade's worth to me, really. Scary to think that I'll pay less than half of a month's broadband bill for the new server...)
Actually, though, I wouldn't even be upgrading at all if it weren't for the problem with the archives. A P2 300 running Linux is fast enough as a server to saturate my broadband, and before now I've never done anything that was time-critical and CPU/memory bound on it.
One thing I probably will do differently from my current setup is mirror the drives, instead of striping them. More reliable overall, and I don't need 18GB on the server.
