Would it be possible to get an RSS feed of all new ARC forum topics? I love using Google reader to parse through all of the cruft out on the internet and found it to be an awesome tool.

I think a lot of people would benefit from new forum topics getting inputted into an RSS feed system -- just my two cents. :up:

We've talked about it, but an RSS feed is a LOT of load on the server - more than we can really deal with. Imagine 100 people subscribing times 500 new posts per day = 50,000 updates of ~1k each == 50Mb of data extra per day. It's not the bandwidth, but rather the processing that the server has to do for the feed itself.

If someone introduces an RSS feed that doesn't kill the server, then I'd be happy to add it - I'd like it myself.

Does ARC have a dedicated machine, or is this site virtually hosted?

Netcraft shows its running Linux / Apache
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.atlantareefclub.org

http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.atlantareefclub.org


Do you have any insight on the load of the machine? Are you provided with an actual shell account? I'm a Linux / Unix (Solaris) engineer by trade, and am willing to help you guys out in any way possible. =) Let me know if you guys ever need assistance in that area. :)

This site is hosted on a colocated server with about 200 other sites (almost all small, with the exception of just a few). Current load averages show 0.23 0.16 0.11, so the server is not overburdened at the moment, although it can get higher. We had to transition off another server about 6 months ago because we were seeing load averages in the 5's and 10's (!).

Yes, I have full SSH and ftp access, and for the rare occasion when I need to check something beyond normal user level, I have an admin account on the box. The box is leased by another member on this site, and he has granted all the access we'll ever need.

We appreciate the offer to help. Do realize that, just like any organization, we're hesitant to grant full access to just anyone, but stick around, and we might ask to help share the load. I have a background in maintaining colocated racks, maintenance and then programming on unix systems for ~7 years (and that seems like ages ago), and now jump around between coding unix and the windows world. LorenK is my right-hand-man, and has a good bit of experience in both worlds as well; when he can't cover me, haninja comes into the rescue. We've got a good handle on most things, but occasionally run into issues- nobody's an expert on everything! ;)

Very cool. Thanks for running the site by the way -- I started reefing about 4 months ago. I'm super excited to see such an awesome reefing community here in the Atlanta area.

You might want to take a look at this some time:
http://www.orcaware.com/orca/

Orca is a freeware utility that will generate load graphs on CPU, Memory, Disk, Network, etc and can keep it for historical purposes (daily, weekly, quarterly, annually, etc). You can find out when the box was busy, and were possible performance bottlenecks are. Maybe something that might help in the future?

My friend, Matty and I, keep a *nix technical blog here: www.prefetch.net/blog

If you ever wanted to see more deeper stuff about Apache, take a look here:
http://prefetch.net/blog/index.php/category/apache/

Cheers!
:thumbs:
Mike

Cool stuff on that blog- bookmarking now so I can take a look at it when I have more time...