The ads appear now as if they are local images, awesome 🙂

You will notice that the maximum CPU utlization is 29% at around 7:30 am, at this time the old server would hit 100% CPU utlization.

The 29% is before enabling APC (Alternative PHP Cache) which replaced PHPAccelerator I used with the old server, you can see a major drop in CPU utilization after enabling it.

I love it, I backed up everything Pictures, Movies, PDF books, ISO images, everything you can image, I wounder why I didn’t buy one earlier.

My brother in law Turki Almuamer suggests that I should buy one, after his laptop go stolen from Dubai airport with all of his data :(, sorry for your loss Turki, and thank you for the suggestion, and another thanks to Abdullah Aldosari for suggestion on where to buy it.

ClamAV is an open source Anti Virus software for UNIX systems, we use it here in SAUDI NET to stop Virus in email message it stops thousands of viruses everyday, I also use it in our personal hosting service that we provide for our customers, unfortunately some customers upload virus intentionally and unintentionally, so I installed ClamAV to scan and delete viruses.

Last week I noticed one of our trouble making customers uploading sospious files, I ran “clamscan” on the user directory but it didn’t detect it, when I tried to download it my PC anti-virus software “MicroTrend” stopped the download warning me about the Virus. So I went home and downloaded it again and scanned it using Norton AV, it didn’t detect it either!

FreeBSD is my operating system of choice, for many reasons, one of them is the great documentation, all you need to know about FreeBSD you can find in FreeBSD handbook.
But to make thing better Mr. Greg Lehey decided to release it for download under the Creative Commons license. Go pick your copy at http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/CFBSD/

Thank you Mr. Greg

To find out how fast our new servers are I run a small test using ab Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool.

I’ll send 10,000 requests using 10 simultaneous processes, I run the same test on both old and new server:

Old Server

$ ab -c 10 -n 10000 www.alriyadh.com/zzz.txt

:

Time taken for tests:   78.172 seconds

:

New Server

$ ab -c 10 -n 10000 new-www.alriyadh.com/zzz.txt

:

Time taken for tests:   3.851 seconds

:

This mean that the new server is 20 times faster than the old server, the test is really unfair because the old server is running on production and serving other requests. I’ll repeat the same test after migration to see the real numbers.

Alriyadh.com is hosted at MeduNet, they unpacked the servers on the lab for now, and hopefully they will prepare the racks and install the servers next week.
Mean while I went to MeduNet and installed FreeBSD 6 on the 3 servers, fortunately I brought 2 installation CD with me which allowed me to work on 2 servers concurrently. The whole installation process took 1 hour for the 3 servers, of course this a basic setup to allow me to connect remotely to continue installing required software.
I went back home and continued working on the servers, it took more than 7 hours to update the system and install the required software, specially Cricket which required a lot of time and configuration.
I also started migrating some of the data from the old servers to the new ones, and to tell you the truth the link between those servers are extremely slow, I left rsync running for overnight and it only copied 1.7G out of 10G.

rsync is a really smart file transfer tool, when you want to move a large directory from machine to machine it is the best tool you can use.

The tool utilise ssh protocol (among others) to transfer files, this is a sample command:

host_1# rsync /some/dir host_2:/other

The above command will copy the directory /some/dir from host_1 to host_2, the smart thing about rsync that it check what files are already copied so it won’t copy them again.

alriyadh.com new servers arrived, we are upgrading from 4 Sun Solaris machines to 3 HP machines with FreeBSD, the machines specification as follow:

• Dual Xeon 3.40GHz
• 1GB RAM
• 4 x 36GB Hard disk

The servers should be in production next week, you should notice significant performance improvements Insha Allah.
Other website enhancements will follow that wasn’t possible with the old hardware.

Finally my website http://rayed.com/ became the first result in Google when searching for “Rayed”:
http://www.google.com/search?q=rayed

For years and years when you search for my name you will get X-Ray related sites, because the past of the verb “ray” is “rayed”.

I signed up with Google AdSense, and you can find Google Ads in sidebar, I am still learning about the AdDense program.
But basically it allow content providers (i.e. owner of Internet websites) to earn money by displaying google ads, and each time a person click on an add it add more credit to him.
To learn more here are some links from Wikipedia links:
AdSense
AdWords
Mediabot