What's with the changes?

Well, since you asked, I’m becoming more energy efficient. In order to do that, I’ve made one BIG change.

No longer is davisremmel.com or tylerremmel.com being hosted on my mega-honkin' server. It was cool to have, but it was undisputedly overkill for two small personal sites. Instead, this site is being hosted on a PogoPlug (a plug computer). It’s small (size of a stack of CDs), silent, and only consumes 4 watts of power. My old server is huge (large tower), noisy (3 120mm fans are installed to keep things cool) and consumes, on average, 300-400 watts – overkill, for sure.

When I cut the umbilical cord on my old server, my room fell (almost) completely silent. I had gotten used to the server’s noise…I was able to hear my laptop’s hard drive spinning once it shut down! Wow, that’s something.

If we assume a kilowatt of energy costs 15 cents, let’s see how much money I’m saving in energy costs. The large server costs 0.15/kW * .35kW * 24 hours * 31 days = $39.06 for a month of operation! My little PogoPlug costs 0.15/kW * .004kW * 24 hours * 31 days = $0.45! Umm…WHOA! Let me rephrase that…MEGAWHOA!

Along with new hardware, I’ve installed software to match. Now, the PogoPlug is running ArchLinux, Lighttpd and SQLite; very clean systems. MySQL, alone, ate hundreds of megabytes of RAM. SQLite resides on disk, so access times are longer, but that’s not a major concern since the boot disk is a USB flash drive. I’m going to see what I can do about copying my site files to /dev/shm (shared memory) later tonight, when I know nobody is going to be accessing our sites.

Oh, one more thing. WordPress is gone, because Chyrp is so much awesome-er. When caching is turned off, it only has 7 DB queries per page!