The following is a message from Dr Brian Leverich at Rootsweb:
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As you probably know, load on RootsWeb has been skyrocketing.
The
lists.rootsweb.com server now handles about 50% of the
load of the biggest listserver on Earth (
plum.lsoft.com), and
the
www.rootsweb.com server now handles about 20-40% of the load
of
www.microsoft.com (and they use 15 servers (-8 ).
One problem we're having is that the Linux operating system just
doesn't seem to be able to handle this load gracefully. We've
been having multiple system crashes each day, and it's basically
preventing us from doing other things we want to do (like get
search engines up and Web interfaces to your message archives).
Anyway, the solution seems to be shifting to a different version
of Unix -- FreeBSD -- which is generally regarded as much more
stable under load than Linux. FreeBSD is used by a number of
very large sites, including Yahoo and
ftp.cdrom.com (the world's
busiest FTP site).
We'll be converting
lists.rootsweb.com and
www.rootsweb.com to
FreeBSD over the next few days. You can expect some down time
and probably some annoying glitches as we make the transition.
Please bear with us -- I think we'll have the moves completed in
the next few days, and I'm guessing that we'll be fully back to
normal (including achieving our old 98%+ uptime performance)
within two weeks.
Sorry about the growing pains, B.
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--
Dr. Brian Leverich Co-moderator, soc.genealogy.methods/GENMTD-L
--
John E Cain; 4601 Concord Drive; Garland, TX 75042
http://www.rootsweb.com/~msamite/index.htm -----Amite County MS
http://www.rootsweb.com/~jecain/index.htm -----Homepage & CAIN & WARE
Queries