You know, the legacy left by parts of my forum app still bite me now and then. One of the things I did poorly, and many years ago, was build an e-mail queue. It's very memory and disk intensive and not efficient at all. Not one of my prouder moments. So if I do a mass-mailing for CoasterBuzz, for example, the memory usage gets high, which ends up causing disk thrashing as it pages to disk, and before you know it the whole server starts slowing down.
I had one of those moments tonight. Some of the problem is just the server itself, but I can't really afford to replace it right now. I get a good deal on the one I have, but it's a single-core P4, I think running at 2.4 GHz, and only a gig of RAM. It's the RAM that's probably the biggest constraint. It would definitely benefit by having more.
Perhaps next year. I've been saying that for years, but this time I really mean it. :)
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