Blair's Blog

This is the webmin view of memory and disk allocation for my webserver:

Not too encouraging. Particularly since when I grabbed the image, there really wasn’t that much going on with the webserver. The machine is an old and tired (c. 2000 – who’d have thought that a computer from the dawn of the new millennium would be described this way?) PIII-550 with only 256 MB of memory and a 10 GB hard drive. It used to have an astonishing 384 MB of memory but one stick went bad and caused a host of wonky errors when I tried to rebuild the box with ubuntu. Things were OK (mostly) while the blog was mainly text based, but all of the messing about with extra plugins and the photo galleries is starting to put some strain on things. Most of the memory use is the mysql database, so things don’t get much better than what the image above shows, only worse. Last night I tried to upload and open a 4.3MB zip file and ran out of free memory. Not too good.

So now I need to think about how to retire this box and get something with a little more oomph. The first thing that comes to mind is to get a nice shiny new powerful box for Brenda and I; then I can shuffle all the old hardware in the fleet down one notch in the food chain. Sadly that means 4 rebuilds – I’m already tired out, just thinking about it. But wait, in the spirit of never raining without pouring, my Dad called earlier this evening and his computer is kind of dead … 5 rebuilds.

I guess I know what I’m doing this weekend…

ps. 27 December 2007 – On the weekend of 15/16 Dec, I upgraded to a AMD 1700 with 512 MB of RAM and an 80 GB drive. This is the new webmin view of things:

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