Just because you have 16gb of memory doesn't mean you won't ever swap. Firefox is not the only application running on a computer. My working set is routinely over 7gb and I have 8gb on my laptop. A goldfish will grow to full its bowl. If I had 16gb, I know I could use it. Every little bit counts.

Really? How? I'm currently coding and browsing the web and I'm only at 1 GB, out of 2. Sure, the VM isn't on, but that's still another 500 MB.

I don't understand what surprises you. The memory load depends in large parts on the work requirements, I'd guess.

2 weeks ago I went from 4 GB to 8 GB (still would love to have more) here at work, because 4 didn't cut it and lead to lots of paging.

  Visual Studio (often 2 or 3 instances, grabbing around 300-500 each)
  MS SQL Server
  IIS
  OCR Engines (depending on load)

With Windows 7 as host (already not a slim OS) this killed my productivity with 4 GB, especially if (to get back on topic) I opened my beloved Firefox...

Same here but from 8 to 16 on both my desktops. Huge improvement under Windows, less under Linux with SSD. Working habits vary, but I multitask a lot.

I've easily burned through 8GB of memory when I'm crunching numbers on large-ish datasets in Octave. (And through twice that when I had a bug in said Octave code...)

In my stack eclipse + tomcat hits up to 1300mb, plus leaky firefox with another 1gb, and windows and everything else at about 1.5gb. 4gb is barely enough.

Windows 7 sidebar.exe on my machine regularly wanders north of 4GB, until I restart it.

(It just shows a clock and my CPU core temperatures.)

I used MSSQL up to MSSQL 2005 and MySQL up until about the same time. Around then I switched over to PostgreSQL completely and have not had a reason to go back. My biggest complaints had to do with simple replication and that was mostly solved in Postgres 9.0. Postgres is a damn fine database.

Well I am quite honestly bored of paying £240 a month per cpu licensing costs.

I have no objections for paying for licenses but it's just getting too much. They put their costs up recently from £180 a month to £240, when we tried to pass that onto a client they pulled their face, it's getting hard to justify the cost of running a web server on a Microsoft platform

I agree with the parent. Something very simplistic in json or yaml would be preferred.

I can't play it. I've played too many FPS and Flight Simulators in my time. The controls need to be inverted so i can fly it like a real plane. Too bad.

I also had this problem. Whenever I'd need to respond quickly, I'd try to use inverted controls, then crash.. :(

Very nice, thank you. Mostly all of this is good advice and correlates nicely with my experience.

One thing though:

"EBS volumes and Software RAID is best but scary on AWS"

I've managed an EBS RAID10 database for a few years now. I wouldn't touch this with a 10 foot pole.

Do yourself a favor, set up an m1.xlarge (or bigger) instance, put the ephemeral drives in a RAID0 and mirror across multiple machines using hot-standby, slony, londiste, or some other tool. You'll be much happier, your system will perform much better, and you'll have a failover strategy in place.

I dont understand this - is there a difference between an explicitly allocated EBS volume and the ephemeral volumes of an EBS-backed instance ?

Or are you focusing on the RAID10 part - but then everywhere RAID10 is touted to be the best RAID solution (right balance between performance and safety)

EBS is a shared networked SAN. The performance characteristics of it are not that great and even worse, highly variable. The last thing you want to be running your database on is a system where the performance characteristics vary greatly throughout the day and you have no control over it.

The ephemeral drives are drives directly attached to the server and to the best of my knowledge are not a shared resource. Their performance characteristics are highly consistent, but if your server goes down all data on those drivers are lost.

EBS sounds nice in theory, but by going to EBS RAID you throw away most of its benefits (such as snapshotting) and take on it's worst aspects.

Ephemeral volumes are shared, just not nearly as variable.

Yes, there is a difference between EBS volumes and ephemeral volumes of an EBS-backed instance.

And what happens when the AZ goes down? Don't you lose data then? Or do you mean multiple machines across AZ/region?

You'll want the mirror in a different AZ. Or you could also put it in a different region.

Use Wal-E to push wal logs to s3.

Absolutely. You should always be spreading your data across multiple availability zones and where feasible across multiple data centers and S3 is a great place to store your wal logs. We do the same thing.

Agreed.

I personally go through my RSS feed every few months and re-evaluate my feeds. If I have feeds that have low signal to noise ratios, or simply publishes articles that I never read, I remove them.

Also, I segregated high volume feeds (such as Flickr picture feeds and Gizmodo/NYTimes/BBC etc.) into a separate account. I have two accounts, one (low volume) where I try to take a closer more thorough look at everything, and another (high volume) where I simply do a quick scan then mark all as read.

Don't blame RSS for your inability to manage it.

The 'trends' tab in Google Reader is useful to check on that: it gives you both how many items a feed published and how many you clicked on for the last 30 days. This can be useful to confirm the ratios.

Most of my feeds publish only two or three times a week, some even less, but with high signal to noise ratio; that's where RSS really shines, since checking them manually would kill a huge amount of time.

Exactly... but, i can imagine how someone who is obsessed with keeping his rss feed reads all read will have a problem.(much like email). I personally have found it useful to have a limit of not more than 100 posts a month.If i do, i unsubscribe on some feeds that have become irrelevant to me.

Nope, he does not mean open a port. Ports is the name of the packaging system FreeBSD uses, and a port is the equivalent (more or less) of an RPM or deb source package.

http://www.freebsd.org/ports/

Doesn't that become awfully confusing?

Only out of context.

If your server had a network connection problem and you needed to open up a port, we're already talking about network ports, not software, so you would try to diagnose your network.

If you asked me how you could get the old game `rogue` on your system, I would tell you to go install the freebsd-games port, which has nothing to do with networking, and so it clearly means that you need to look in your ports tree.

Nice. Much better.

As the Father of a 19 month old I can only say this is a complete rip-off.

Craig's list, friends and family, birthdays, holidays, garage sales, second hand stores, 50% off coupons, the list goes on and on.

$16/mo for two outfits? Really? Maybe $1/mo/outfit or something like that and I'll bite. Right now, one years subscription would be more than her entire wardrobe and we're pretty much done until age 4.

I thought the same thing, but ran it by my sister (a busy working mom) and she said the benefit wasn't the value of the clothes, but her time-- this system would save her from having to go shopping.

agree. Even shopping at clearance at Target, Ross, Walmart and Marshals .. lets say 6 outfits over 3 months for 16X3 = $50(rounded up) - for $50 at discount stores... can go a long long way.

Argh. Same crap as with all the population predictions. Everybody always assumes the graph is exponential. It is not. It always levels off. The real trick is predicting where/when that will happen.