[Donger]

Originally Posted by DaFace

We just outgrew the old server, basically. On the technical side, the main issue was RAM. We were on a 32-bit operating system, which only allows 2GB of RAM to be allocated to a single application. Ideally, you want our database backend (MySQL) to have enough memory allocated to it so that all of the indexes can be held in RAM all of the time. For example, when it runs a search, you want the search index to be in RAM so that it doesn't have to parse through millions of posts on the hard drive, which is much slower. We were only able to allocate about 1.5GB to MySQL, and we had a total of around 2GB of indexes, so it was having to use the hard drive for queries a lot more than is healthy.

Our new system has 12GB of RAM and is on a 64-bit OS, so we can allocate pretty much all of it to MySQL if we want to. The way it's configured right now, MySQL gets around 8GB, while everything else gets 4GB (as much as the old server had in total). We'll be tweaking the memory settings as time goes on, but that's the basic idea.

(Hey...you asked.)

Yes, I did ask.