Intel Corp (INTC)

[Bob Zumbrunnen]

And it'll make my life a lot easier, too. The two things iHub most needs right now in a db server is plenty of horsepower and SQL Server 2K5.

Current box is SQL 2000, 2 Xeon 2.8's, 4GB memory, and about 70gig of hard drive.

A pair of 3.0Ghz 5160's, SQL 2K5, 8GB memory (they're pricing me 16 to see if I want to up the ante before the machine gets built) and 700GB of what's supposed to be much faster hard drive. And everything will be 64-bit.

I'm guessing I'm looking at something along the lines of 2-4 times as much horsepower, which will definitely help a lot, and SQL 2K5 will be wonderful because of how much better and more efficiently it does Full-Text Indexing. Not only is it supposed to be able to update indexes "orders of magnitude faster", it gives good visibility into the catalogs so I can, for example, print out the 1000 most frequently-indexed words and see which ones are unnecessary, resulting in smaller catalogs, faster updating, and faster searching.

And the main problem with iHub right now is that with the sudden increase in traffic, we've got enough horsepower to deal with the traffic or maintain realtime full-text search, but not both. Though I'm still working on ways to do both before the new box arrives since it likely won't be installed and put into production until early September.

We already have a new webserver (pair of 3.8Ghz Xeons) but have yet to put it into production. We've had a number of false starts with it, so we're holding off now until the new db arrives and will put them both into production at the same time.