BARF is brought to you through Jelsoft's vBulletin software delivering its content via PHP and MySQL. It is, and always will be, running on Red Hat Linux using Apache web server software.

January 2003

We will be putting the database onto a separate machine now that the card finally arrived. Distributing the load between two machines will allow us to permit a greater number of concurrent connections and vastly improve performance. I've seen periods during which graphics slowed a bit, but it hasn't been of much concern (no one else has mentioned it).

Additionally, BARF's third server will go online as a utility machine; mail, reports, backups, failover, etc. I don't yet even know how to leverage this new machine (the most powerful of the three) but I'm sure it will be needed in a few short months.

December 2002

The rig is holding up remarkably well, especially considering that the parts needed to distribute the server are long overdue. BARF has served in excess of 10,000,000 hits (roughly 2,000,000 pages) per month for the past 3 months now. This is in conjunction with almost 1,000 pieces of mail per day.

At the time of this post, the database is averaging 12 queries per second over the past 47 days. Oddly, this number has risen almost exactly in-pace with the number of months BARF has been online.

We're getting close to the bandwidth cap - looks like it will be time to renegotiate, which is due in February anyway.

September 2002

We're now running on a machine with more RAM. The 256 MB has been quite an improvement in performance. Very rarely do we get the 'Server Busy' errors, and I have yet to receive notification of insufficient database connections. Well, once, but that was a software problem, not hardware. We're not finished yet, though.

This transition to the new machine was made in conjunction with a move to a new facility. The new location offers much better network performance and, as such, our bandwidth allocation was boosted to 8 times its previous level. I don't think we should be exceeding it too soon.

August 2002

We've been getting a ton of 'Server Busy' errors and there are times at which the database cannot keep up with the web server. Looking into the log files and watching database sizes I determined that attachments were what was killing us. I crafted a script to pull attachments out of the database and write them to disk, altering the posts to link to the attachment rather than retrieve them from the DB. Server performance has increased dramatically.

February 2002

BARF now runs on a leased server at a server facility in California. The hardware is a Celeron 800 w/ 128 MB RAM. The fact that it's dedicated provides plenty of horsepower to serve our purposes. The location at a server farm adds network reliability and speed, especially considering the poor reliability of PacBell DSL in the San Jose area.

January 2002

BARF goes live on a non-dedicated P3-600 w/ 128 MB RAM.
It is running at the theSteveCo's home on a machine he uses for software development. The connection is via DSL, which is great for a workstation, but sucks for a server.