Server upgrades afoot
Posted by Scott Laird Sat, 26 Aug 2006 08:44:22 GMT
This site actually lives on a box under my desk at home and talks to the world via DSL with a static IP address. For the past three years or so, it’s been running on a 700 MHz Athlon with 768 MB of RAM and a 5 GB hard drive (from 1997!). The old box has been working hard to keep up, but there’s just too much going on between mail, Asterisk, multiple blogs, and a zillion other services, and I have a few tools that I’d love to write but there’s just no way the old box could keep up.
So, it’s time for new hardware. I have an Athlon 64 sitting in my home office mostly unused, so I’m going to swap it into service next month, after I finish travelling. The new box will be an Athlon X2 3800+ with 3 GB of RAM and a pair of 250 GB drives. That’s probably an 8x jump in performance over the old hardware. I’m going to try to use it with Xen, so I can spawn sites off onto their own virtual server for better isolation, but I’m not sure how well Asterisk will cope. It’s basically a realtime app that needs direct access to a pair of PCI telephony cards, so it’s not all that easy to virtualize.
If you would, I’d really appreciate it if you’d update your blog about this.
I’ve been thinking of doing the same, recently - I’ve actually got a Athlon 800 (actually an underclocked 1Ghz), and I’m wondering how well Asterisk would work with virtual machines running on the same machine.
I’ve had a couple requests for Asterisk updates. Someone put it at BarCamp complained that blogs are really bad at saying “yep, everything’s still working fine,” so I’m planning on writing a new set of Asterisk articles once I get everything working.