Charlie's Diary

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Fri, 21 May 2004 Alas, poor server ... This server is dying. Back when I rented it, on a three year lease in mid-2000, it looked fine for my purposes, which were running a web server for a couple of medium-duty personal websites (intermediate between very-heavy personal and light-duty corporate) and providing email service for my friends, family, and self. That was before the web server had to handle upwards of 100,000 distinct page impressions per month and the web server found itself acting as a spam filter. I reckon we're getting a couple of thousand spams a day between us, which may not sound like much -- but the server is an aged Cobalt RAQ3; a Pentium-II running at 450MHz, with 64Mb of RAM and a 10Gb disk. The spam filtering server SpamAssassin eats working memory by the double-fistfull, and filtering a single message can chomp up about 10-20Mb for a few seconds. If three spams come in within the space of a minute, the machine begins to grind. It badly needs more memory -- but that isn't really an option. Adding blogging software, blog-despamming software, mailing lists courtesy of MailMan, and other nice stuff only makes the picture worse. So does the exponential growth in spam. If the spam vanished, things would be fine, if a bit tense: but as it is, I've watched this machine run with a load average in the range 5.0 to 30.0 for the past six hours and it's clear that it is dying on its feet. A load average of 1.0, in UNIX-ese, means that there's a single job queued up and ready to run behind whatever the computer is doing right now; a load average over 1.0 means the machine is fully loaded, and a load average anywhere over 10 means the machine is badly overloaded. This year's peak load so far was around 75 ... Which is why you probably can't get through to my blog, or to The Prattle or Paganlink or www.ciphergoth.org from time to time: I've had to shut down the web server for long enough to clear a backlog of mail. Anyway. Next week I'm about to buy a new house rent a new server. It'll have about five to ten times the MIPS, sixteen times the memory, and sixteen times the disk capacity of the current one. But it will take me some time to move everything over, because not only is it the web server for several domains, it's doing mail, and spam filtering, and FTP, and mailing lists, and web, and primary DNS, and a bunch of other stuff. I am going to have to put my slowly-rusting Linux hat back on and do a load of system administration work, instead of writing. Bah, humbug. [ Discuss Linux ] posted at: 18:28 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry

specials: Is SF About to Go Blind? -- Popular Science article by Greg Mone Unwirer -- an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction Inside the MIT Media Lab -- what it's like to spend a a day wandering around the Media Lab "Nothing like this will be built again" -- inside a nuclear reactor complex Quick links: RSS Feed (Moved!) Who am I? Contact me Buy my books: (FAQ) Missile Gap Via Subterranean Press (US HC -- due Jan, 2007) The Jennifer Morgue Via Golden Gryphon (US HC -- due Nov, 2006) Glasshouse Via Amazon.com (US HC -- due June 30, 2006) The Clan Corporate Via Amazon.com (US HC -- out now) Accelerando Via Amazon.com (US HC) Via Amazon.com (US PB -- due June 27, 2006) Via Amazon.co.uk (UK HC) Via Amazon.co.uk (UK PB) Free download The Hidden Family Via Amazon.com (US HC) Via Amazon.com (US PB) The Family Trade Via Amazon.com (US HC) Via Amazon.com (US PB) Iron Sunrise Via Amazon.com (US HC) Via Amazon.com (US PB) Via Amazon.co.uk (UK HC) Via Amazon.co.uk (UK PB) The Atrocity Archives Via Amazon.com (Trade PB) Via Amazon.co.uk (Trade PB) Via Golden Gryphon (HC) Via Amazon.com (HC) Via Amazon.co.uk (HC) Singularity Sky Via Amazon.com (US HC) Via Amazon.com (US PB) Via Amazon.com (US ebook) Via Amazon.co.uk (UK HC) Via Amazon.co.uk (UK PB) Toast Via Amazon.com Via Amazon.co.uk Some webby stuff I'm reading: [ Engadget ] [ Gizmodo ] [ The Memory Hole ] [ Boing!Boing! ] [ Futurismic ] [ Walter Jon Williams ] [ Making Light (TNH) ] [ Crooked Timber ] [ Junius (Chris Bertram) ] [ Baghdad Burning (Riverbend) ] [ Bruce Sterling ] [ Ian McDonald ] [ Amygdala (Gary Farber) ] [ Cyborg Democracy ] [ Body and Soul (Jeanne d'Arc)  ] [ Atrios ] [ The Sideshow (Avedon Carol) ] [ This Modern World (Tom Tomorrow) ] [ Jesus's General ] [ Mick Farren ] [ Early days of a Better Nation (Ken MacLeod) ] [ Respectful of Otters (Rivka) ] [ Tangent Online ] [ Grouse Today ] [ Hacktivismo ] [ Terra Nova ] [ Whatever (John Scalzi) ] [ GNXP ] [ Justine Larbalestier ] [ Yankee Fog ] [ The Law west of Ealing Broadway ] [ Cough the Lot ] [ The Yorkshire Ranter ] [ Newshog ] [ Kung Fu Monkey ] [ S1ngularity ] [ Pagan Prattle ] [ Gwyneth Jones ] [ Calpundit ] [ Lenin's Tomb ] [ Progressive Gold ] [ Kathryn Cramer ] [ Halfway down the Danube ] [ Fistful of Euros ] [ Orcinus ] [ Shrillblog ] [ Steve Gilliard ] [ Frankenstein Journal (Chris Lawson) ] [ The Panda's Thumb ] [ Martin Wisse ] [ Kuro5hin ] [ Advogato ] [ Talking Points Memo ] [ The Register ] [ Cryptome ] [ Juan Cole: Informed comment ] [ Global Guerillas (John Robb) ] [ Shadow of the Hegemon (Demosthenes) ] [ Simon Bisson's Journal ] [ Max Sawicky's weblog ] [ Guy Kewney's mobile campaign ] [ Hitherby Dragons ] [ Counterspin Central ] [ MetaFilter ] [ NTKnow ] [ Encyclopaedia Astronautica ] [ Fafblog ] [ BBC News (Scotland) ] [ Pravda ] [ Meerkat open wire service ] [ Warren Ellis ] [ Brad DeLong ] [ Hullabaloo (Digby) ] [ Jeff Vail ] [ The Whiskey Bar (Billmon) ] [ Groupthink Central (Yuval Rubinstein) ] [ Unmedia (Aziz Poonawalla) ] [ Rebecca's Pocket (Rebecca Blood) ] Older stuff: June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003 August 2003 July 2003 June 2003 May 2003 April 2003 March 2003 February 2003 January 2003 December 2002 November 2002 October 2002 September 2002 August 2002 July 2002 June 2002 May 2002 April 2002 March 2002 (I screwed the pooch in respect of the blosxom entry datestamps on March 28th, 2002, so everything before then shows up as being from the same time)

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