Wampum

That's the view of today taken at about 7pm. The load average on the server hosting Wampum (and nothing else) was in the mid-60s for part of the 4 o'clock hour (EDT). Our normal load is about 1 and change. For those of you who know what this means it is a dual processor (996.85-MHz 686-class) node w/1GB of RAM and two ST318437LC (all the load inelegantly on one partition of one drive), and about 65 perl5.8.8 processes and the same number of httpd (2.0.55) processes, and a 4.1.18 mysqld process.

We are cpu bound here, not b/w bound (that bill will fall due soon), unlike '04 when we were b/w bound. Its an ad, in a sense, for MT 3.2. Just for completeness, when we hosted Alas A Blog and Barry's blog was targeted by a ddos (several hundred attack nodes doing an ad insertion campaign made _much_ worse by MT's then-foolish-anti-comment-spam dorkage), the load average went to about 100 w/o crashing the host.

Why people engage in synchronous behavior is beyond me, I can't even get myself near a mall after Halloween, but it does make for interesting system load mix and performance data.