Hardware
One of the most frequent questions I’m asked is, “What sort of servers are required to run a porn search engine?”. Everyone seems a bit surprised by my answer: thus far, nothing special. From EveKnows.com’s testing launch in March until early July, in fact, the site ran on a single Athlon XP 2200 machine with 1GB of RAM and a standard IDE hard disk. Nothing special indeed. That configuration hasn’t had any trouble handling 60,000 page-views daily. Of course, I’m running EveKnows on a highly-tuned Linux server with custom-written software; everything has been optimized to make the most of the available resources, but the point still stands: it doesn’t take much hardware to handle the current traffic load.
Last week I finally upgraded to a dual-core Athlon 64 X2 4200 with a SATA hard drive. The new site design will go live sometime this week, marking the release of EveKnows.com 1.0. With luck, I’ll get a little bit of publicity and increase the daily traffic. The extra power is designed to insure against any possible spikes; I’d hate to get an influx of new visitors and watch the server melt under the load. At the moment, though, the load is sitting between 0.03 and 0.08. At least I can recompile kernels faster than ever before ;)
Also, I’ve added a Hardware category to this blog. I’ll keep everyone up to date on how the new server performs and how things scale as the site increases in popularity.