The Question and Answer Board

[Bob Zumbrunnen]

Had never seen that Linux ad before. Cool!!!

I can't imagine us ever being anything but a Microsoft/Dell shop.

Took *forever* to move SI from Solaris/Oracle to Windoze/SQL Server. I know nothing of *nix, and know enough of Oracle to despise it.

Worst-case scenario (which I'm now seriously considering) is buying another server with a decent CPU, a bit of memory, and a zoomy and roomy IDE hard drive and using it for everything search-related for both sites. The RAID5 setup that both sites use on their db servers is definitely not the ideal setup for the multitude of small reads and writes the full-text indexer is constantly doing, although it's darned near ideal for the huge reads it does when a search is run.

But if I move all full-text search related activities to a separate machine that does nothing *but* that, not only should the ceiling get raised quite a bit when it comes to search performance, it'll also free up a lot of headroom on the existing servers.

SI has an amazing amount of headroom. iHub still contains a lot of inherited inefficiencies that won't get completely addressed until I move it to ASP.NET, although a lot of those inefficiences are in the database itself and I'm starting to address that. Until then, offloading search to another machine should really help with the headroom situation. And the beauty of it is that I don't need to get a Dell Server-class machine for this. This can easily be done more than well enough by a beige box. Fast CPU, a couple gig of memory, and a fast hard drive.