The news is now 3 weeks old, but this site is running on a brand new server. The old system was starting to become unstable due to age, and I was also worried about the age of the disk and important data we keep there.
Some details on the new Server:
- It runs an ultra-low-power Atom processor. That's hardly server material in normal circumstances, but this is an extremely low-traffic site. There's no sense in paying for power I don't need. And even though it's just an Atom, it's still a significant upgrade: dual core with hyperthreading for 4 logical processors, each at 1.6Ghz and 2Gb of RAM. Compare that to my former 700Mhz PIII with 384MB RAM.
- The hard drive is now 4 times larger than before, with plans next year to move to a raid array of some kind with even more space.
- It uses Windows Server 2008. It's not the absolute latest server operating system from Microsoft (R2 is out now), but it's close.
- Why yes, that is a ServerFault.com sticker on the side of the case.
A big part of the transition to the new server was moving this blog. And thats where the problems came in. You may have noticed over the past few weeks that pages could sometimes take much longer to load than they should. There was a problem with the old dasBlog software on this particular system that was causing significant slow downs. As much as I tried, I was unable to track the issue down. Therefore, as of right now this blog is now powered by BlogEngine.Net.
BlogEngine.Net has a much younger (and more current) code base and has some nice new features, like the new Twitter widget on the left. Keep looking over the next few weeks as I spend some time setting up a few more little quirks like that. I even managed to get the link format working so that old bookmarks should still function (there may be some edge cases, but I think I got that vast majority of it). Most importantly, pages load at an acceptable rate.
It's not all roses, though. Getting my theme moved over was a lot of work, and there are still some rough edges here and there. There are also definitely some quirks with the new software, and on more than one occasion I had to fix some obvious bugs in that code (I plan to submit patches back after I've had a chance to check them thoroughly). Hopefully I found all the "gotchas". Finally, I'm not sure the old rss feeds will work. I know that one there were a few people with RSS subscriptions. I hope to fix that glitch this weekend, but if that's you and stumble on it before then, it's probably best to just subscribe to the new feed url. If anyone finds any other problems, please let me know via the contant e-mail icon at the top of every page.