I updated antville.org to the current CVS snapshot. Sorry for the outage that was caused by that update. As usual, new code, new hope.

Among the more visible changes, the Antville Blogger API is working again. In fact, I'm posting this using w.bloggar via Blogger API. Posting via Blogger API now supports getting the user's weblogs, getting the user's recent posts for each weblog and posting a title by including it within <title></title> tags in the posting's body. Tools like w.bloggar support this. It's cool, check it out!

One downside to the update is that Keeping track of story read counters had to be disabled. It just caused too much database traffic (also see my previous posting). That means that from now on, you won't see any changes in your mostRead pages, at least as long as we get the new server.

Looks like we have a problem with the scheduler on antville.org. A grep from the access log:

[2003/02/06 13:48] antville:internal:scheduler 333 marked, 0 inserted, 333 updated, 0 deleted in 898358 millis [2003/02/06 13:56] antville:internal:scheduler 248 marked, 0 inserted, 248 updated, 0 deleted in 455056 millis [2003/02/06 14:04] antville:internal:scheduler 93 marked, 0 inserted, 93 updated, 0 deleted in 473335 millis

Possible problems are DB write performance or concurrent write locks. I'm investigating...

I ordered the new, future antville.org Server the other day. The picture above shows what it will look like on the inside. After lots and lots of thinking and discussions with people with lots of experience running big server racks, I decided to go with a bigger 2 unit server instead of a 1 unit model. The reason is that 1 unit rack servers are tightly crammed and usually have significantly reduced lifetime compared to spacier models. They also lean towards thermal problems, and they are less extensible. People also reported reliability problems with products from major vendors like Compaq, Dell, and IBM, which led me to think that I could just as well go with a minor vendor as long as the components are first rate and built to run. Which is why I went with german server discounter Thomas Krenn, which offers significantly more bang for the buck than any other vendor.

Here are the specs:

2 HE Dual Rack 4000, IDE and Dual CPU Tyan Thunder LE-T mainboard with ServerWorks ServerSet LE chipset 2 x PIII-S 1400MHz Processors 2048 MB ECC Registered SDRAM 3ware 7500-4 IDE RAID controller 4 x 60 GB IDE harddisks 2 x redundant 300 W power supply extractable rack rails CD-ROM drive

The price is 3447,41 Euro, so we already have the necessary amount of money. There is however a possibility that we will have additional upcoming expenses of a few hundred Euro. If this is so, I'll let you know. For now, there's no need for additional funds. Thanks for everybody who contributed!