As I see it, there are two problems with the site/machine:
1. The machine has a hardware problem of some sort. After a reboot it takes about 5-minutes for the machine to get past the SCSI-bios disk-spin up. It could be a bad SCSI terminator or a sticky disk in the array. Furthermore, when I tried to update the kernel with the newest RPM from Red Hat (this machine is running a Dell-specific version of Red Hat 7.1) it went into a kernel panic and locked up. Rather than debug the problem at the time (since we had just driven down to NYC to fetch the machine from Ben and returned to Boston) I just put the old kernel in place and started the site.
2. There is a performance problem with some code somewhere. This machine is a 1-GHz PIII with 1.5 GB of RAM and 2 18-GB SCSI3 disks on a hardware RAID 1 controller. It doesn't get enough traffic to bog it down like it's been. We're running much busier sites on less hardware.
I've provided a new machine to move the site to while we fix the current machine and get it updated. A team of volunteers lead by Dave Bauer is working to move the site, but I'm afraid I've probably been the bottleneck -- I've been busy and haven't had as much time to work on this as I'd like. But it's getting there. Dave will have a better idea of the current status.
Once we get the site moved to a new machine I'll be upgrade the old one with a second CPU and new, bigger disks and debug whatever hardware problems the machine might be having.
