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You’ve may have noticed that this site has been under maintenance and unavailable for the last twenty hours or so — the “retooling outage” went live around 24 hours ago.
The reason has been due to migrating to a new Virtual Server based hosting service.
Whilst I have been impressed with the Media Temple gridserver (gs), the persistant sluggishness1 is not exactly something I have enjoyed. It’s made worse by the fact I know just how well the grid can perform without such brakes.
Indeed (mt) have been engaged in a game of whack-a-mole for some time in attempting to improve overall performance. They are determined to win and I don’t doubt for a moment the last mole will feel the full force of the engineer’s mallet in short order.
Don’t get me wrong, the grid ticks a number of boxes, in the shared hosting and entry-level space it universally wedgies the opposition. Hands down.
This upgrade path is as much about gaining more control of my hosting environment, as it is a thirst for more power and reliability. Not that having more horsepower is a bad thing. I’ve grown very accustomed to it over the last 24 hours and can well see why (dv) users speak so highly of it.
Part of entering the (dv) community is a raft of self-actioned changes, such as tweaking Apache to push performance into the stratosphere, or configuring php5 as the default PHP engine, combined with a small handful of requests sent to the (mt) crew for actioning. Both were actioned very quickly, the second was processed in less than two minutes.
That’s tight. It takes me longer to make a cup of coffee.
And have I mentioned speed? Intel Quad Core CPUs running at 2.3ghz have zero issues handling anything. I’ve yet to nudge the load out of 0.00, which is almost creepy to observe. Extremely cool, very fast and worth every penny.
Even though the virtual server entry level is a mere 256 kilobytes of ram, the four rampaging Baskerville Hounds ensure there’s no delay in handling requests, mitigating a lot of the typical cache-and-wait slower processors introduce.
Stage one, moving to improved hardware, is almost complete. Things should have settled down for most folks within the next few hours. Stage two is changing platforms, which is now well-and-truly under way.
- which sadly ruins an otherwise fantastic service (↩)
Robert X. Cringely has recently weighed in on his belief that
Apple will provide a full windows api for virtualisation of windows xp, on a mac.
.. but I also believe that Apple will offer in OS X 10.5 the ability to run
native Windows XP applications with no copy of XP installed on the machine at […]
