Kiwiblog Server upgrade

The Kiwiblog Server is being upgraded this weekend, which means Kiwiblog will be down between 10 am and 4 pm on Sunday 20 April.

Inspire Net, who are the very kind hosts, currently have me on a Hyperthreaded P4 3.0Ghz, with 4 Gbytes of ram, and a hardware raid 5 disk array.

Normally this would be more than enough for a blog. But due to the sheer volume of posts and comments on Kiwiblog, the new plugins that work well on a small site, struggle due to not being written to handle the sheer mass of data that Kiwiblog has accumulated over the years.

This has meant the blog performs very slowly during high load, due to a combination of sheer lack of horsepower in the current platform, and a memory leak in one of the new plugins that is being investigated at present.

So what are we moving to?

The new server is a Quad Core Xeon, 8Gbytes of Ram, and hardware Raid 10 disk array, and the server is capable of expanding out to 2 * Quad Core processors and 32 Gbytes of ram if the site continues to grow.

Once again many thanks to Inspire Net for their work on our behalf. And due to the upgrade you all have an excuse to get outdoors on Sunday!