First, the good news: the Resonant Information server is now twice as fast as it used to be. The bad news is that it still isn't really fast enough.
The server that runs resonant.org and brttc.org is an ancient piece of hardware, running on an ABIT KT7A-RAID motherboard with a mere gigabyte of memory. The processor for quite some time had been a 750 MHz Duron chip, the cheap replacement that got dropped in when a failed watercooling experiment destroyed the Athlon 1800+ chip that had been in it originally. Unfortunately, as the size of the site grew, this became more noticeably insufficient, and I was finally spurred to action today when it completely keeled over, killed by processor churn. I had an Athlon 2400+ chip left over from the recent upgrade of my desktop machine, and although this isn't a chip technically supported by the KT7A, it does fit within the basic specifications, and ABIT boards are designed for overclocking, which means that in theory they have the tools to set the motherboard to use chips at any speed as long as they have a 100 or 133 MHz bus clock.
In theory, the Athlon 2400+ chip is a 2.0 GHz chip, or a 133 MHz clock with a 15x multiplier. This unfortunately doesn't work. The system locks up and refuses to even boot back to the configuration screen under that configuration. I tried 13x. That locked up, too. Finally, I just gave up, and let it use its autodetected value of a 1.5GHz chip, presumably using a 133MHz base with an 11x multipier.
That's a 25% underclock, but it's still twice as fast as it used to be. Unfortunately, I'm watching it try to update the aggregator and churning away horrendously, so it's obviously nowhere near fast enough. It took ten minutes of full CPU burn to complete. At some point, I am going to have to just give in and buy bigger hardware. This is probably a reasonably good time for it, as dual-core 64-bit and PCI Express are now common enough to be mostly affordable, except that I've been hemorraghing money this year, and I need to keep my savings up for a potential move in a few months.
Still, this site should now be noticeably more responsive than it used to be, and it should last me at least to the end of the year, when I'll have a better idea of how good life is going to be to me.
