Dear Mr Man Who Does Not Pay Us Nearly Enough -

[codecattx.livejournal.com]

(x-posted to my journal)

Dear Mr Man,

When you call me asking "Why is my server performance so abysmal?"

I want you to look at a few statistics -

Over six years ago, you started with:

Six (6) Web Servers with

One (1) Pentium II 500 MHz
1 GB of RAM (20% utilized at load)
Eight or nine Websites configured with host headers per server

You have now:

One (1) Web Server with

One (1) Pentium II 500 MHz
1 GB of RAM (95% utilized at load)
52 Websites configured with host headers

Performance will always suck for you until you listen to me and upgrade your dren, rebooting will not fix it, defraging the hard drive will not fix it, the only thing that will fix this frelled up setup is a completely re-engineered solution.

And when you come to me with SSL problems due to you saving your SSL Cert in Microsoft Word and then wondering why you can't get the formatted ASCII text file to work, it would be wise to listen to my suggestions and just let me fix things to begin with rather than engage me in a hour long argument as to why That Cannot Be Done.

Now that having been said, I also have to say this:

"I am so smart! I am smarter than you could ever hope to be. Who is your daddy? That's right, I am. I have more neurons firing in my little toe than in that whole big empty head of yours, and don't you forget it!"

Thank you for your attention,

David

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Should have seen it when we ran Windows 2k server on a pentium pro 180. Only took about 10 minutes or so to boot up.

[codecattx.livejournal.com]

I guess I should mention that this particular server has been running since the mid 90s and is so fragile at this point that it has to boot off of a floppy disk because we long ago lost the boot partition and the customer does not want to pay to have it rebuilt.

[sketchydave.livejournal.com]

kudos for the judicious use of Farscape curses.

[jarad.livejournal.com]

I feel your pain.

I have one customer who has an ancient Celeron 300 machine. It's runs this horrible, hideously developed 'search engine' that uses a hodge-podge of ASP, Perl, an Access database, text files and the Windows Indexing service to run. It leaks memory worse than a holy sock full of custard. And about once a week, due to the memory leaks, horrible bad design, security holes and general age of the machine, it dies and has to be rebooted. And every week we go through the same thing with him that it's old and he needs to fix his site to prevent it happening again.

At some point, he's gonna get told to go to hell...