Welcome to My World

Well, come to think of it, I am now considering relocating at least the photo gallery, and quite possibly willfe.com itself. My own damned desktop and crappy cable modem have been more routinely reliable and (much) faster than their servers lately have been. I understand the design choices they make to try to keep things running reasonably well for most of their users, but everything I’m seeing lately points to one big problem that any web hosting company is quite loathe to actually fix (because it’s expensive to fix “correctly”): overcrowding. The server this is sitting on right now is just too packed with people. I suspect the MySQL server, a separate machine from the one hosting the site itself, is equally overloaded.

High load averages are to be expected on a busy machine. Right now (as I type this) the web hosting server is actually “only” showing a load average of 5.69. I’ve seen it as high as 80 (which is borderline “your machine is about to fall over dead and you should feel lucky it was able to print the numeral ‘80’ before it croaked”) and a more realistic “average” is about 20.

I haven’t made any decisions yet firmly, though I am actively mirroring everything on the sites so I can start experimenting with bringing at least the gallery online from home. It’s not like it’s a high-traffic site and my poor overworked cable modem can handle the bandwidth requirements of a simple gallery. Bluntly, even with bandwidth limitations it’ll run faster at home than it has been at Dreamhost.