What exactly is a server? is it a tangible thing? Aee they costly? Would you like us to does lots of advert clicking so you can get some more?

[ChaosTrulyReigns]

I have been clicking - Tesco kitcgens won't last and they do one called Porto which was both apt and pleasing.

Can you just order servers off the shelf? Is there a shop? Hiw many more can you fit in Biscuit Towers? How many would yiu need to stop a repeat performance of the travesty that was PenisBReakerDay. Not a typo.

How much much clicking do I need to do? Should I be prodding my few MN fruends to click away as well?

"Every little helps."

That advertising's gonna get ya.

Must be one huge server, if there's only one.

For the non-techy, I don't mean in terms of actual size but memory.

And that explains the slow site.

If DH said that two servers can handle 1M hits a day, I can't see the problem with one doing 330k - unless there's some sort of synergy in having 2 rather than one that means the sum is better than the two stand alones?

However, I don't know anything about it, having a DBA as a DH so leaving anything techie to him (the printer, bought in May is still not installed because everything he does is paperless and he emails me at work if he wants anything printed out

Oh I agree with that. I didn't say it was a good thing, just a huge thing!

No redundancy, for one thing. Very risky.

Our work cloud server just fell over. Spectacularly. Our IT is rather red faced and sweaty atm trying to recover about 3 days worth of sales data. I have to make a backup plan to show the tax man in case his recovery plan fails.

Lunatic - thank you for the explanation - yes, that does make sense. In other words, two lower spec servers that, in total can handle 0.5M hits is probably better than a single one that can do it on its own...

It's not just how much it's getting hit, mistle. It's what else is on that one server. Is everything on that server? The entire database, CSS, HTML etc etc etc that makes up MN?

That's what makes it truly scary!

Hi all, we do have more than one server, a separate db server etc (more than one actually), but we have a pinch point related to caching that means many talk requests have to go to a single application server. That's what Justine means by "the server" and that is the issue that we are looking to address currently by switching to a different caching system and different underlying app server software, which will allow us to "scale horizontally" more easily in future, bring in extra servers on demand for spikes etc. But it's a huge change so we are scheduling it in bits. We should get there soon.

DH says that makes sense...

Whew! I didn't think you were insane Tech!