Today was like a flashback. I spent the day firefighting server problems on Rotten Tomatoes while simultaneously juggling phone calls from business partners, sending out faxes, and fixing ad campaigns. It felt like the early days of Rotten Tomatoes when the site traffic was growing faster than our ability to improve our hardware to accomodate it. In a way, it’s kind of like a two-edged sword — sure, it’s bad to have overloaded servers, but it also means that you’re likely accomodating a great amount of traffic. Still, it feels like a boiler room on these freaky Friday’s when I’m trying to administer the servers like a mad man. I was hoping to hold off on buying new servers until April, but I might need to buy them a month early in order to keep the site running properly. Ordinarily, I’ve been trying to budget our server expenses to 2 new servers at $3000 each every six months (i.e. $1K/month). However, since we skipped our “December” server purchase, I might be able to have a field day and spend $8-9K this time around and get three sweet servers. It’s a pleasant feeling doing a clean install of newly ordered servers and getting this gigantic “Bogomips” counter on the login screen. The last time I installed the servers, it provided an estimated 40% computing power increase from just two new servers. I’m hoping to get around a 50-75% increase this time, although our site traffic has grown by around 30% since last May when we last did our server upgrades.
I had dinner with Leslie last night at a pleasant Vietnamese restaurant in Inner Richmond called Le Soleil. It was decent, but it reminds me that I really need to visit more restaurants on Clement Street since there’s such a good variety of cuisine. Does anyone have any suggestions for new restaurants? Besides Brothers and Brothers II, I mean. I really miss when Jen lived in Sunset and we could just walk over to Golden Gate Park in the afternoons, stop by for boba drinks and Vietnamese sandwiches, and relax. I could live that lifestyle for a long, long time.
On the flip side, I’m looking forward to tonight’s Wushu workout. I actually really enjoy the 3 hour Friday workouts — they’re a bit too long (I’d prefer 2-2.5 hour workouts), but it’s fun doing lines with the beginners and spending alot of time improving my sections for sets. Plus, alot of people who don’t ordinarily drop by (like Ivan, Jen Hsu, and Felicia) occaisionally make an appearance. It’s like a big ol’ Wushu reunion.