Welcome back! And let me start off by telling you that this February was again a record month, both in traffic and number of pages served. Our AMD videos took up the bulk of the raw traffic whereas many of you also followed the daily IDF coverage from San Jose. You may have also noticed that on the 20th a link to one of our articles was posted on Slashdot.org which always results in an impressive amount of simultaneous users and traffic. Fortunately our dual 1.26GHz Tualatin server, outfitted with a RAID0+1 array of 120GB IDE drives, kept up quite well and the website was only unreachable for a few minutes during the first half an hour, after that we easily managed to cope with the load. Our maximum sustained output was 7.13Mbit/s which is impressive considering the fact that we only have a single server running, and all is due to painstakingly optimizing our software; Linux RedHat, the Apache webserver and our MySQL database.
Fig 1. The new 2U rack case featuring a dual 2.8GHz Xeon, 2GB of RAM and two Cheetah harddisks in RAID1.
We値l be upgrading to a 2nd server soon where the 2nd will be a dual 2.8GHz Xeon which will only handle the database and the dynamic content, our current box will then be left handling the static content and will also handle all the live video streams etc. So basically we値l be running a load balancing configuration. They値l be crosslinked with a crosslink UTP cable so all traffic from the 1st to the 2nd server will not be served over the switch at our ISP, this will both speed things up and also reduce our costs for traffic as we won稚 be using any of their infrastructures. Naturally this means that we値l be able to scale upwards much more aggressively with traffic and handle loads up to about 25-million pageviews per month.
Naturally we don稚 just play around with the new server in our lab, we池e also diligently working on a number of different other articles and reviews. We値l have an IDF wrap-up posted shortly followed by a first look at Serial-Ata and two new 52x CDRWs. And we値l go into greater detail on how a datacenter operates and what precautions are being taken to ensure the servers in the racks keep on running 24/7.
