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.