Poor site performance

Apologies for the slowness and occasional downtime lately – the server this blog is hosted on is a little VPS (a virtual dedicated server) hosted with Bytemark. It’s been a great little server and great value, but I think we’ve outgrown it now.

It only has 80MB RAM allocated, and watching vmstat shows that it swaps like mad reasonably often. I just had to restart MySQL, as presumably the kernel did an OOM kill overnight.  I’ve asked for an upgrade to give it more RAM, which should keep things going until we can finish refurbing our new server and whack it in a rack somewhere.

Now *that’s* a scary blowout

A biker on Visordown had a front-wheel blowout on his Aprilia Tuono.  Now a blowout on a motorcycle is always a scary occurence, and something that all bikers hope they’ll never have to deal with, but this one was even more scary – it wasn’t the tyre that let go, it was the wheel itself!

“Docca” made it to the side of the road safely despite the damaged wheel causing the bike to shake violently, almost to the point of a tank-slapper – fair play that man, good riding!
Continue reading Now *that’s* a scary blowout

David Precious – professional Perl developer, motorcyclist and beer drinker