I need a break

I don’t function well with this much work to do. I don’t have time to take a break for Thanksgiving. I need a long break. If only I had gone to a normal university I would have had summer breaks… that would’ve helped.

The server running W3Counter started acting funky and needed a reboot a few days ago… for the first time in about 6 months. It just hasn’t been running the same since. I think it lost its groove as to what tables stay in memory/cache. Doesn’t help that people keep signing up for new accounts. I have no time to work on getting improvements released or tweaking performance right now. Not that there’s much left to tweak.

I need to outsource some of my responsibilities. Soon.

Posted on November 19, 2007 in Personal

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  • http://www.bloggingtips.com Kevin Muldoon

    I would definately encourage you to oursource some of your work if your getting swamped. If you let things get on top of you then you may find all of your websites will suffer in one way or another. :)

  • Max

    Wait, what? Drexel doesn’t have a summer break?

  • http://www.dangrossman.info Dan

    Only the freshman year. The next 3 years are 6 months class, 6 months coop. No break, straight into the 9 month senior year of class.

  • http://www.ryansgoblog.com/ Ryan Williams

    Maybe it’d be worth considering using one of the various server management companies to look into the underlying server issues and make sure it’s running as best as it possibly can.

    It’s relatively inexpensive, and it sounds like you need some kind of quick fix for the server that you can’t really do yourself at the moment. If it was running fine before it must be a configuration problem.

    Servers can be great to learn and play with when things go right, but if things go bad and you don’t have an intimate understanding of them grounded in personal experience it’s very easy to get in over your head.

    Short of throwing more hardware at it I can’t see what more you can do. By the sounds of it you have a very optimised application! :)

  • http://www.dangrossman.info Dan Grossman

    I’m using all the RAM on the box… there’s one last thing I can do to reduce query load when I have time to write and test it, then I do need to simply partition the database across a second server. Not that hard, just costly and needs a bit of code to direct requests to the appropriate database. I’ll get around to it all eventually… December I have to focus on maximizing sales at the advertising sites. It’s the busiest month.

  • http://www.dbstract.com Roger Stringer

    Making to decision to outsource your work is never a fun choice, but it ends up being a decision that can work well.

    Just remember to make sure that whoever you do get, knows what they’re doing.

  • http://www.theblogexperiment.com/blog-forum/ ses5909

    I’ve noticed it on w3counter. I have a server management company that I would highly recommend: http://www.touchsupport.com.

    I started using them over a year ago and haven’t looked back. For what I need I pay $50/month and it’s well worth it.

    I used to try and manage my server myself but I hated it and it’s not something I have any interest in learning how to do, much less do well.

  • http://www.dangrossman.info Dan

    Thanks for the recommendations, I will start looking around soon. Yesterday things got kinda messed up… the server got in a ‘bad place’ where there were too many disk-bound activities going on and it wasn’t possible to read/write fast enough to catch up. I eventually smoothed it out and it’s back in its normal groove today… hopefully for another 6 months!

    I need to figure out a way to generate the “global stats” report without killing the disk. Even if I write into a memory table, that report involves querying the entirety of every single site’s logged data, which means reading ~25GB off the disk on top of normal load.

    I wonder what it’d cost to have a second physical disk put in the box…hmm:)

  • Max

    I hire a company similar to TouchSupport to manage my server, but to be honest, I wouldn’t trust them with such a *mission-critical* job. I’m with PlatinumServerManagement.com.

  • http://ratedpixel.com Oliver

    Design wise if you get stuck with anything and need some help give me a shout, I’ve followed you for a while now and you seem like a really nice guy :)