A Dolphin's Journal of Events

After doing free and fun projects for the past 6+ years, I finally put my talents to use on a for-profit project.

The RuneScript Tracker!

Basicly a site to show experience gains for a player on the game RuneScape.

Includes a custom graphing script which I wrote several months ago. Can do gradients, anti-aliased lines and fonts and more.

And completely customizable, except I haven’t put up a page to help people with that yet.

Anyway, hopefully from the ads and all I can gain some fun money as well as pay for the server. I’d really like to not have to pick up a cruddy food service job in this small town. Of course me and spling have to decide how to split the money..

Of course, that brings up a whole new topic since there’s 4 “owners” of the RuneScript Project and numerious “staff”.. : I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it..

On the latest episode of CSI The Theory of Everything, Jamie and Adam from the MythBusters did a cameo apperance.

Here’s a few screen grabs:

Was much fun. “Dont tase me bro!” was also featured, said as from the internet meme as a joke.

And blah blah. Nothing else interesting to report.

iSCSI on our server really helps out quite a bit. For those who don’t know, iSCSI on Softlayer basically works like a networked drive, except it’s setup for high speed, meant for things like databases and such.

So far, it’s been great for the large 2 GB stats tracker table on the rscript project, but hasn’t sped much of anything else up. Most of the other tables are fairly small, and in fact, I think it’s slowed them down a bit more then anything. But if it has, it’s only by a little bit, and not exactly noticeable.

iSCSI sucks for large transfers though [a little less then our current 350 GB sata drives], but rules if you have apps that seek around a lot, with < .5 ms on Softlayer for seeking. [Most drives have 10-20 ms seek time, worse near the end of the drive] Definitely beats out getting a 15k rpm disk, cost wise.

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So anyway, we ran into another problem that's been haunting us for a long while now. Disk cache. On Windows 2003, the OS will swap out applications to disk, so it can fill the disk cache with large files. This can totally kill the server performance when doing even simple copy operations with large files. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense why the OS tries to swap out RUNNING applications to try and speed up file access, and then causing the whole machine to slow down like heck.

All I needed to do was limit the Disk Cache to a specific size. It'd keep the disk cache useful, without the negative effect of swapping applications out.

After a lot of searching, I finally found what I needed. There's many applications which periodically check the cache size then trims it, but I wanted one that would force it. Turns out there's not a whole lot out there, but Windows Server 2003 [sp1+] allows for "SetSystemFileCacheSize" system method, which I found a application for. You can find the periodically trimming application, as well as the permanent trim application for Windows Server and Vista, here.

4 GBs of ram on the server, so I set the cache to 1 GB. The results were fantastic.

Copying our entire web directory, none of the applications stalled or slowed down, and RDP remained speedy, as a bonus, the transfer only took 5 minutes instead of 30. Guess the swapping out really affected the disk operation more then the disk cache was suppose to fix, ironically. Finally I was able to run our backup script without things slowing down. As well, the Capped.TV encoder doesn’t kill the system when dumping raw video.

Linux systems don’t typically need to worry about this, since the disk cache is a bit smarter, according to some *nix admins I talked to.

Thanks to Cynthia for continuously telling me it was disk cache slowing things down which I didn’t listen to till after I eliminated every other variable. Sorry for not listening. <3

It was much fun!

You can view the demo I released with s_tec here.

More later. I have other things to work on.

I’m going to Cleveland. Be back in a few days.