A bandwidth graph.

Just to say, Dewi's right about the above except given the tight git that I am (OK, conservative with cash flow might be the Schwaebisch word ) I'm afraid I ordered the server to come on a 10Mbit link to the backbone as we never for a moment thought we could fill that up with page requests. Mind we still haven't with all our sites (29 or so at last count?) but it did mean the other customer (serving up 6MB MP3's and 39MB .movs as new content for his community) clogged our access bandwidth when his community tried to download and view them at the rate of 7,000 instances per hour or so.

But yes, in spite of sourcing some righteously good value dedic servers and connection capacity we've had a bit of heavy weather recently but we think the storm has passed.

Aha, but, looking at the bandwidth graphs, we've never maxed it out: it was CPU.

The NIC in the machine is definitely a gigabit card, though we may be capped at the router to 10Mb (the easy way for them to do bandwidth upgrades I guess!) but we never even hit 10M/sec.

The problem was we had a load of 15 or more. "Load" is an indication of how many (on average) processes were using, or were waiting to use, the CPU at any one time. At most one can use it, so all others are queued. A load of 1 means that the CPU is being fully used. A load of 16 means that there's a long queue waiting to use the CPU, and the machine is probably about to lock up until it's managed to finish all that processing.

We now mostly have an average load of 0.05 or less, peaking to 0.15 at high-usage times. That's a nice level, which gives us a fair bit of breathing space.

ok, but what does it mean?

yah,i'm kinda confused?

It means someone who was explicitly told not to was hogging all the resources on the server when he did updates to his website. This made the server VERY slow or actually unavailable. We kicked him off and now things are running much better

That's all...

well, aint that nice

well gud to know everyone else speeks IT but could someone tell me what the end result is...in english pls

and how this will effect us

*shrugs* dont look at me, the only thing i understood is that the site will work better.

can i make a guess?

hmm...do tell...i know i shoudl know, but i don't

someone who hasn't been around 4 a while

lee?

why would lee post about himself?

I do

Errr, guys, what makes you think that the person concerned is a member of thudgame? He just had a website that was also hosted on Lee & Dewi's server, so when his website used up all the resources, there were none left for us... So you can keep guessing forever without working out who it was (unless you go through everyone in the country, I suppose). In case you're wondering, I dunno who it was, but that's not really the point. What matters is that now there's much less risk of something similar happening.

MS

they have a server now?

They have several I think thudgame is on a great big datacentre server somewhere in the US that they rent a chunk of, rather than a computer in their back bedroom like my server is

MS

maybe its a big CIA server, and were all lab-rats in some sicko game that tests us if were fitting to some black-op unit or, more probably, not

you've been watching too much Alais...come with me

i kinda thought this was a 2 bit operation run by a 12yr old computer in dewi's bedroom..there go my dreams

As we're in pedantic mode today...

Spelling sarge, spelling. Tsk, tsk. Firefox has this big, friendly spell-checker that can spellcheck whilst you type (gasp! Amazing what they can come up with nowadays!). You can post in British, Australian, Murrican, auf Deutsch or even Magyar AND spell it correctly Just gotta install it...

Sarge, come on mate! You said you studied logic and yet you've fallen for the ole a priori leap-of-logic mistake. And haven't read up on previous posts where we have said we have a dedic server with root. Has the coffee worn off? we're not on top form today, are we?!?

it has magyar?
time for you to learn out langauge...you'll need to when my people take over the world anyway...we're starting with universities.

and send me the interface file...translating is not like declaring a war you know...i can't translate what isn't there

In my defence a) i didn;t know that a dedic server couldn;t be in the garage (seeing as dad has 2 dedic computers running the fire wall day and night for the past maybe 5 or 6 yrs) b) it was 3am

do explain what is the difference between brit and aussie? you spell it color (a painful rite for me) but here it's colour liek in england.

and i don't drink that poison dad calls coffee...I like hot chocolate...which I am pretty good at making.

In order to cover my ass:
From here on out; whatever I write, becomes the official spelling for whatever I meant.

oh here we go again...first of all, try to spell properly,i often find myself going back and forth typing when i make mistakes,it makes reading things easier,2ndly coffee is great,one day when you're older you'll find a place for it in your life,and 3rdly you told me you were gonna tell me how to make good hot chocolate,and yet...?

maybe, but dad's coffee is not for beginners trust me...milk and sugar are perversions to him.

ah that... ok listen closely:

1) heat up about a 75/25 - 50/50 mix of milk and thickened cream not to boil but hot

2) when you've done that put it in a coffee plunger* and start plunging like your life depends on it...this gives it a smooth frothy aerated texture

3) in another thing, mix chocolate powder (or coocking chocolate if you want, but get a knife and flake it first to increase surface area) some sugar (to taste cos i find raw HC too bitter) then add a little cinnamon/chilli (HC is like sex and chilli is like well you figure it out but it really makes it pop) then add a little hot water to the mix and stir until you get this black chocolate paste. then you heat it. Try not to burn the sugar but some caramelising is gud. this brings out the true choc flavour and while you stir, it homogenises the mix.

4) put some paste in the mug, add some milk/cream, stir to make it more liquidy and then you can pour in the rest of the milk/cream and if you plunged it right, you shoudl even have some nice froth you can put on the top.

viola

N.B. the quality of the HC depends on the milk (use fresh. duh!), cream, sugar, spices and most importantly the chocolate. I endorse Blooker chocolate powder (dutch) cos i know it's good or anything from koko black. But "black and gold" is good and fair trade which means they make sure that unlike starbucks, the africans who collect the cocoa get payed a fair amount. usually anything west european is good but go for the benelux (belgium luxemburg netherlands)

*it's like a tallish thinish glass cylinder with a like a lid and a long rod with a disk on the end with holes in it...what it does exactly is not known but by forcing the liquid through the holes when you plunge the rod up and down it gets the air into the mix making it smoother and creamier...the exact method for plunging is an art and i don;t have the linguistic skills (shock horror) to explain it.

has anyone tried it yet?

no, because it sounds like a lot of work and we don't have one of them things to make the milk creamy and nice
but one day i shall try.

[sigh] here i am pouring out my heart and soul......

oh well.....