Some you who visited in the early afternoon might have noticed that the site was down. This was because it was being moved to a new, faster server.

I'm interested in your feedback - have you used the site in the past and noticed that it has become much faster since the upgrade? If so, how much faster is it?

Mark

Nobody wants to give any feedback after the upgrade?

Well here's some feeback from me. I've noticed that it is faster, but not as fast as I had hoped. It seems that during idle periods it is very fast, but is still taking its time under load... The problem is that the disk system is now the bottleneck so I am going to split load across multiple disks and buy some faster discs and more RAM to fix this...

Mark

A small update. Don't have the new server hardware yet, but I doubled the RAM and the server seems much happier. You should notice a speed increase. New server hardware should arrive in 2-3 weeks.

Regards,
Mark

Changeover to the new server is complete. Now running in a Pentium dual core 2.8ghz, 2GB ram (1GB to the virtual machine). SATA 10,000RPM RAID 1 array.

Response times switching between pages is noticeably faster for me, but unless you have a fast broadband connection you may not have noticed the difference.

The main point is that the server can now cope with heavier load much better, and during these times should continue to serve pages faster.

enjoy...

VMWare? Did you know it's free now?

Yes, or rather it will be. The new product, "Server", which replaces workstation, is still in beta. When it is released I'll use it in production, but that is some time off...

Beta Schmeeta