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Originally Posted by Azure
Yeah, interesting.....I didn't realize that.
I guess the one day bandwidth idea would probably work great. Even if it costs a bit....I'm sure its not THAT much to increase your bandwidth for one day. Especially if the guys who look after the server realize that we only have a few days out of the year where traffic spikes like that.
I still think we should have a clearly visible donation button though. Doesn't matter if there are only small hardware upgrades. We can still help pay for everything.
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Its always a tug of war between bandwidth and server power. You bump up the bandwidth and now the server can't keep up. You upgrade the servers and then you have unutilized processing power even with a saturated internet connection.
The current server is way more than adequate 363 days per year. However, today we temporarily tripled the bandwidth and the additional volume of requests almost maxed out the server CPU. Dynamically generating all the forum pages from the database requires a lot of processing power.
I do think that a donation button is a good idea.
Ideally, a Calgary based company would donate some rack space and bandwidth for the server. That would eliminate the monthly colocation costs and would bring the server closer to home. Then all we would need to worry about is one time server purchase/upgrade expenses whenever additional capacity is required.
I'd love to have a caching proxy server sitting in front of the web server. And then move the database to a separate server as well. But that likely isn't going to happen if we're having to pay significant monthly expenses for rack space and bandwidth...