I have joy, so much joy. I love my fellow man. Or at least my hosting provider.

My other domain is 27.org. I use it mostly for mail and "projects" which can be separated from my semi-informed ramblings here. I keep the two unidirectionally distinct. Meaning, you might see links from here to there, but no links from there to here. This isn't because I mind the cross-pollination, but because 27.org is where I put stuff I wouldn't mind an HR department seeing. Monkeygumbo is just that: a randomness jambalaya. You might find anything here. I like keeping the two separate, with neither being secret. If you find me here then you found what you were looking for without me having to tell you where to go searching. Shame on you. You find 27.org then I hope whatever constructive bit I put up there helps you. Each is open, and I've got nothing to hide (why write it in the first place?). Google sees all.

For about two years now, I've been trying to get my 27.org account (27 and MG are hosted by the same company) moved to a new machine. When I got the domain, a Pentium 2/450 was the shiznit, and 256MB of RAM was beefy. That's what 27.org was hosted on for a long, long time. Up until about 45 minutes ago. I'm now on a quad-cpu 2.80GHz Xeon box. With two gigs of memory. It's bliss. I can't even tell you how nice it is.

See, I actually use my shell account on 27.org. Like, a lot. I've usually got four or eight ssh sessions going throughout the day. For instance, I use pine to check email and I dedicate a shell account for that purpose alone. So I notice when the server would slow down. In fact, just today I was typing something in a vi session and my crappy typing speed was outpacing the character echo by about 30 seconds. Stopping to correct a misspelling was taking over a minute. I checked the load average and it was over 30. Then all my connections got dropped. Some of those had connections to other hosts. You know how annoying that can be?

So making a long story not nearly as short as it could have been, I complained to my hosting company. I even went so far as to write an application which recorded various system metrics and saved them in a database. I figured that if I had a few months history I'd be able to justify my request for a server move. After all, if my web server was a kid, it would be starting first grade this fall. I wanted to be able to prove that it was getting old, and I needed test scores.

What I saw was atrocious. Over six months, the mean load average (doesn't that sound weird?) was something like 3.5. The highest was nearly 160. The 50 highest load average events started at like 60. The server sucked big ass and was a pain to use. I sent many many letters explaining things I've documented, and I worked with tech support to get them data they wanted.

Turns out that they listened. I don't know how useful my data was, but it did get accessed. And now they have a feature that will automatically move you to a newer server (Slackware 9 instead fo Slackware 4... w00t!). And I did it. And I'm happy now. And stuff.

That's all I wanted to say, really. It's made me inordinately glad, this new machine. Well, that and the three Stellas I've had to drink.