Every once in a while the guys over at
do a little behind the scenes to show readers what it takes to run the website. This time round they talk about the new forum database server.
\"While the I/O performance of our Forums Database Server was up to par, it was clear that the bottleneck of the server was becoming the CPUs. Our Dual Pentium III 866s were pegged at 90%+ CPU utilization, across both CPUs. Think about the daily tasks you run on your computer, for the most of us, it\'s very rare that we can completely max out two CPUs doing something other than RC5 or heavy mathematical/rendering calculations. It was clear that the Database Server required an upgrade, and we had already found the best candidate for the upgrade – the real trick was in the approach\"
