Serval is the computer this website is hosted on. Serval came with 6 GBytes of memory, but I just expanded her to 16 GBytes for just $45! The 4 GByte strips were $30/each, marked down to $20 and I got a $5 discount per strip. OK, I did have to pay for shipping and handling, but that wasn't much. Now Serval is truly deserving of the term "server". When I took a job with TouchTone Software back in 1996 it was as a software engineer on AS/400 computers. I'd never worked on an AS/400 before, but I was hired because of my background in assembly language and I had a lot of experience on DEC equipment. When I found out that an AS/400 could support 16 GBytes of memory I told the company president/manager that was more then a DEC AlphaServer, which was 14 GBytes at the time.
That's right, Serval has more memory now then an AlphaServer, a computer with the word "Server" in it's name, back in 1996. Actually, DEC upgraded the AlphaServer to 32 GBytes shortly after that, but I find it amazing that I can compare my PC to the big iron of 1996. The OS on Serval, Windows 7 is also maxed out on memory. Windows 7 can only support 16 GBytes, max. The only way to get past that with Windows would be to get Windows 2008 R2; 192 GBytes. For my purposes 16 GBytes is plenty, and if I ever need to upgrade I can do that with the processor. Serval has a quadcore AMD processor with 3.1 GHz of speed per core, but is plug compatible with the 6 core processor from the same family. So what do I need all that power for?
I started getting a lot of hits on my website last year, and I was worried that meant a lot of people were getting blocked out of my website. I was hosting my website on Caprica, a Pentium 4 PC, running Windows XP,and therefore IIS 5.1. IIS 5.1 can only accept 10 connections max. IIS 7.5 is a concurrent server, which means it doesn't have a limit to the number of connections that can be made to it. Of course if Serval ran out of memory, she would have to write the contents of her memory to disk and then load her new connections to memory. Serval would then have to swap the contents of disk with memory as she processed her active processes. This process, called paging, is performed by the operating system and really slows down system performance. When you have lots of memory, paging doesn't occur (at least not as often). With IIS 7.5 and 16 GBytes of memory, Serval can handle all the people who want to visit her web pages.