Troll Echos

A recent upgrade of my personal computer left some impressive hardware available to become an all new Trollserver.  Improvements include CPU, RAM, Hard Drives, Operating System, and several software upgrades.  

The CPU improvements include a jump from a single “old skool” P4 generation CPU to a Core2 Duo CPU with tons more horsepower.  This CPU upgrade comes bundled with a 2nd CPU core to do more work as well as a jump forward into 64-bit computing.

The RAM jumped from DDR/133 to DDR2/800 and from 1GB to 8GB.  This means way more space for running scripts and server programs and the database.  So less waiting for that image to resize or having it fail due to not having enough RAM to pull it off right now.  It also means that when RAM is accessed it’s done way, way faster.

Hard drive space previously wasn’t considered limiting, but has now jumped to an almost silly four times the previous capacity.  Also with the benefits of newer generation hard drives with bigger caches and better transfer rates, not just capacity.

The Operating System moved the small click from FreeBSD 7.0 (32-bit) to FreeBSD 7.1 (64-bit) so I would have access to all 8GB of RAM and the 64-bit features on the new CPU.  Most people aren’t likely to notice much change from this specifically, but it helps all the other changes to work better.

At long last Trollserver has been moved up to FreeBSD 7.0. For almost 2.5 years now Trollserver has been running FreeBSD 6.1 and doing very well with it. Several new features and improved speed in 7.0 inspired the change. And quite a change it has turned out to be.

The live user data for all of the hosted domain names totals almost 17GB now. Any process that involves moving around that much data that many times is automatically a bit of a pain in the butt before you’ve even started. Now I’m sure some of you out there are thinking “only 17GB and he’s complaining about it? I have to deal with backups that are xxxGB.” or something of the sort, but I’m not complaining here. I’m telling a story.

Included in this change, the web server was brought to the current version, PHP was brought up to date, MySQL got a version boost, the partitions on the hard drives got shuffled around to make more space for the things that need it, and some virtual hosts were retired. (Fond good byes to doomxl, style, and portfolio.) For those of you that are paying attention, you’ll realize that this is my first post, and thus that in the mix was the addition of the blog virtual host.

After several issues with missing libraries and general unhappiness on the multiple Gallery configurations that live on this server, all appears to finally be going pretty well. I may require a pretty serious hack to combine the various WordPress databases into a large single one for all the blogs running on this server, but I’ll worry about that in a little bit I guess.