h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've been looking at the server, trying to get a handle on why it occasionally falls over under seemingly little stress.

I had perfmon looking at the process on the server which serves this site, and the working set was veering around the 200M mark. This was with, on average, 50 connections. That meant 4 Megabytes of memory was needed per connection.

Then I delved around and found out I had not been looking at the most important counter - private bytes - which at this point was at a staggering 800 Megabytes. That's 16 Megabytes per connection - you can run the whole of Windows NT in 16 Megabytes, and our server is using that much per connection.

Steps were taken to reduce alleged memory leaks in the scripting language we're using, but even so, that's rather outrageous. 

I say we take off and nuke the place from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. 
 

I know this is an emotional moment, but let's not make snap judgments...this physical installation has a substantial dollar value attached to it --

I don't know if you've been keeping up on current events, but our servers are getting their asses kicked out there!

Tim

They can bill me.

Of course there are those who have already written and submitted enties concerning the practicality of Orbital Weapons Platforms...

Do you have a description of what computers & software you are using anywhere? From the look if it you're probably not using Linux, Apache and Java servlets...

OK, so please feel free to stamp the word geek on my forehead, but I'd also like to know what software you use to build this 'place'.

In another thread in a galaxy far far away one of the staffers mentioned using Visual Studio on their laptop, so are you using Visual Interdev on NT Server or somesuch? I'd be really interested in your choice of web database software as I have to implement one for a large intranet soon and was wondering which way to go (at the moment it seems to be a choice between Cold Fusion and Tango.)

Also, I note that when you jump from one forum to another (via the CGI stuff) the whole page refreshes and not just the frames containing the forum text. Is there any way this could be altered, or is it just my browser that does this?

And in order to get nerd tattooed on my back I was wondering if you could add a filter to your great new index that could filter articles by submission date so we could look at more than just the last five recently submitted articles.

After all that guff I thought the least I could do was drop you a couple of interesting links...

[1] I saw this at the recent Macromedia beano in EuroDisney, nice Flash/Flash Generator stuff with graphics done by experienced French animators:
http://www.chman.com

and

[2] I Got this link from the NME, real 'retro' heaven...
http://www.cream.tv.org
You can get realaudio of the themes to forgotten classics like The Tomorrow People, Monkey, Rockford Files and more.

Forgot to add that I think your site is amazing and the best virtual tearoom / library anyone's built. Ta.

Since you've said such nice things:

We're running NT Server 4 and IIS 4, ActivePerl for the scripts, and SQL Server for the database all running on several dual 450Mhz PIII machines with 512M RAM.

But the code for the site actually fits on a floppy.

Cheers for that.
Looks like I may have to brush the dust off my O'Reilly 'camel' books now. Now what was it again, $=<>{...