Today was spent discovering fun things about Windows 2000, IIS5, ColdFusion, and why camels dance.

10:00 Well, all but the camels part. <G> I did learn some interesting things about IIS5 though; specifically, the load handling on it is great. The test server is a Dell 4200 dual PII 266 with 512 MB of RAM. Running NT4 Server with IIS4 and ColdFusion Server, a similar machine manages to handle about 1500 active iTOOL accounts; with an average load of about 50 user connections at any given time, it runs with a 60%+ processor load.

Running Windows 2000, this server is currently handling 2000 simulated accounts (each site has a page that does ColdFusion processing to make SQL entries into a table, then delete them) with a load of over 100 concurrent user connections without faltering. Processor loading is about 50%, sometimes a little higher. Most of the processing seems to be in ColdFusion, rather than IIS or SQL, so I'm thinking that if we can iron out some of the bugs in the ColdFusion server, this machine might really fly. Part of the plans for today, as a matter of fact.

Today is the day Keri starts her new job, as well; it's a lot of what she's done before with some new twists and challenges thrown in. Everybody wish her good luck.

Good luck as well to Dr. Keyboard, safely ensconced in his new domain name and site. Same old Dr. Keyboard, though, no mistake. <G>

And finally, in other good news, we're spreading more of our influence around the web; Ben Rota, a.k.a. Ator, is provisionally working on his own Daynotes page over on Ars Technica. Pretty soon we'll start infiltrating some of the other tech sites, too... then you never know what will happen next. <SEG> Later. One of these days we're going to have to find time for another good argument, such as the positive and negative aspects of rutabegas as they apply to the Austrian situation. Ah, well. Maybe next week.

12:00 PM Hey, updates on two straight days, all right. I'm on a roll.

More news about IIS5; we took that server up to 3000 accounts. That was our target; we think we can get 5000 sites on a single server now, so long as we use the "good" servers. That's a huge imprivement over NT4. Why the big increase? IIS4 seemed to be well suited for single sites and intranet sites, but not for ISP or web hosting solutions. IIS5 seems to be much more scalable, optimized for real Internet sites and solutions. I noticed while I was playing with the control panels and options on another machine that it was slower than IIS4 when there was just one or two sites on the server, but by the time you get a few dozen sites on it it's outpacing IIS4, and up around 2000 sites... well, I don't even like putting that many sites on an IIS4 box. So I am definitely impressed. Now if only Allaire would get ColdFusion to work properly.

In other news, all these DoS attacks have the conspiracy police salivating. Read this for an interesting read. I don't say the poster is right, but it's an interesting, though paranoid, thought.

Lunchtime. Later.