Sometimes I suspect DoS, sometimes I think someone simply screwed up in a script. DoS is comparatively easy now that everyone and their yellow dog has broadband. I haven't seen the log files for the one Dave blocked last night so I don't know if it might be yet another script run amok.
Before I changed the read-tracking (for the Most Read table) so you had to be logged in before the read would count, some were using scripts (and another even easier trick I won't mention so people don't learn how easy it is to do it) to repeatedly ready one or a few posts on the same board over and over again.
And some just hit the homepage repeatedly. We saw one clown (lately they're usually in China) hit the homepage about a dozen times per second.
A future project is automated blocking when this kind of activity is detected.
The site is still a bit overworked with normal traffic, which is almost a blessing (server-wise) because it's real easy now to spot when something's happening that shouldn't be happening.
I think I mentioned yesterday (but it bears mentioning again because I'm so excited about it) that the new db server arrived yesterday and I'll be installing it as soon as possible (which won't be soon enough for my liking) and it's quite the machine.
I was very disappointed when I went to plug in the mouse and keyboard and found nothing that resembled the mouse and keyboard ports I'm used to. It apparently uses USB for these, which I wasn't even aware existed until yesterday.
It's got a remote management port (which will apparently allow me complete control over the machine at a level you can't get with Remote Desktop -- including starting it when it's shut down) but I can't even use that until I get the machine fired up with mouse and keyboard so I can configure the port so I can use it.
My goal is to get the machine up to the ISP early next week and get us moved over to it that weekend or the following weekend.
My rough estimate is that it's got 2-4 times the horsepower of the current machine thanks to a pair of dual-core Xeons (rather than our current dual plain Xeons), a 6-drive SAS array running at 15k RPM (much faster than SCSI), 64-bit Windoze and the 64-bit version of SQL 2K5, which is supposed to have dramatically improved full-text index/search. Oh, and 8GB of memory and the ability to actually use it. SI's db box has the same amount, but refuses to use more than 4.
Total hard drive capacity is a little over 700GB, which is much more than we'll ever need in this machine's service life, but I had them fill 'er up because apparently an SAS RAID array gets faster as you add hard drives, each drive adding another 300Mbps of throughput to the array. And we've got 6 of them. RAID 5, 146GB each. Since the 6th drive is essentially "wasted" for storing parity (though parity is spread across all drives), 5*146 gives us about 730GB of storage.
One benefit I hope to reap from so much space is by setting the db size to something like 100GB (it's currently about 37GB), it'll be at least a year before it has to grow itself, so it shouldn't get fragmented at the hard-drive level, though we'll still have to defrag the db itself. Just won't have to defrag the hard drive itself.
Defragging has been a real problem. We haven't been able to defrag the current array successfully since the machine was installed 3 years ago because it requires shutting down SQL Server (and the site), and even that hasn't worked when we've tried.
I'll also be sizing the primary partition large enough to store the full-text catalogs (along with Windoze and SQL) so hopefully the secondary partition will only have the actual db file(s), resulting in even less fragmentation of both the db and the catalogs.
And if the new version of Full-Text Search works as advertised, I'll be able to rebuild the catalog in on piece instead of breaking it up by years, although I'd still limit free members to searching only the most recent x number of days, and using Advanced Search to hit the whole thing based on user-specified date ranges or no dates at all.
Just occurred to me I'm going to need to make a gigabit patch cable to go straight from the old machine to the new (our switches are limited at 100mbps) so we can move the data to the new machine in hopefully 1/10th the time it'd currently take.
