Pulp Free

It's now been about a week since all of my HTPC parts arrived and I suppose it's time to divulge a little bit of my day-in-the-life drama of experiences. I do enjoy a bit of computer building as a hobby. Some might call me a computer geek in that I have a basement full of computers. Difference between most is that I actually "use" them on a daily basis so they actually need to work. However, just as many of you know - when you're building items from scratch - there's always gotchas along the way. I was hoping that the decision to build an HTPC rather than simply buying a PS3 would deliver a few days of fun, but a lot more days with just watching great movies and easing my media collection congestion. I think this actually worked out well and for the most part, the technology is available to get pretty good 1080p Hi-Def, Blu-ray and HD DVD out of a computer and into your living room for a reasonable amount of cash (or credit…). Include very little hassle or noise and you get to share in my experience so far…

 So what exactly is in my HTPC? Here we go… (And of course, my opinions to go with each of them…)

CPU - AMD Athlon X2 4850e 2.5GHz 2 x 512KB L2 Cache Socket AM2 45W Dual-Core Processor
	A fairly recent CPU from AMD that has actually worked out quite well so far. Low wattage should translate into lower heat (which of course, should translate into less noise). I ran some quick and dirty CPU benchmark tests against the other computers in my arsenal and it holds its own. Basically faster on some tests and slower on others. (Hmmm… maybe I'll make another post about Pulp Free benchmarks!) However, the CPU shouldn't be doing a whole lot here for just playing back HDTV. While I put together benchmarks for my own amusement, playback of Blu-ay or HD DVD usually averaged around 20% or so. Since those are my target formats, I'm quite happy. When you toss in other formats like MKV where FFDShow is hammering the system, I did hit much higher numbers… Sometimes to the point of pretty ugly hiccups. I found a way to have it drive both cores and it became playable again… But keep in mind, I'm trying to stay somewhat mainstream here. I'll goof around with other formats once the basics are down. In this case - check. We're good to go. (And by the way, we're talking 1080p with 5.1 Dolby Digital as the format of reference.)
Memory - OCZ SLI-Ready Edition 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory
	Not much to say here. They went into the system just fine and haven't had any issues. Pretty nice heat spreaders on them but I'm not over-clocking here so… One thing to notice what that they only fired up to 667 instead of 1066. However, I think that's related to my CPU clock speed more than the memory. To be fair, I picked these up without much research as they were carrying a $50 mail in rebate that made them cheaper than most of the other NewEgg memory fare. Might dig a little deeper into performance at a later time - but memory performance never seemed to be the bottleneck worth looking into so far…
Optical Drive - LG GGC-H20L 16X Blu-ray/HD DVD drive
	Blu-ray and HD DVD work as advertised. Pretty quiet drive for the most part when watching movies. It's only when you fire up a data disc that it's starts really making some racket. I'd say mostly for data CDs when it's spinning up to 52x read speeds. When I played back regular DVD videos it stayed pretty relaxed (although who really watches DVDs when you have HD!) Nice to have SATA as an interface here… Just click and go. Notable disappointments here have been echoed everyplace else. The software (Cyberlink PowerDVD 7.3 OEM) that comes with it will play back your movies without an issue. As long as you don't mind only 2-channel audio. Blah. C'mon! And there's no way at all to "purchase" and upgrade for the 7.3 OEM version to get full digital audio. You can purchase an upgrade to version 8 but you'll lose HD DVD support. (They say you can run both at the same time… but they still overlap a bit). However, either by design or mistake - Dolby Digital 5.1 still played back for HD DVD videos. It was only Blu-ray discs that down sampled (either for AC3 or DTS audio tracks). DVDs still played back in Dolby Digital (haven't tested for DTS on DVD yet…) So there's definitely a compromise if your media collection is made up of Blu-ray.
Hard Drive - Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKS 500GB 7200 RPM
	Extremely dull. C'mon - it's a hard drive! Happened to be the same model that I purchased a year ago for my 2TB media server… Just $60 cheaper! All 5 drives are now doing well. I'm able to get an average of 85 MB/second which is way more than I need for HD playback. Heck, in my system, most of the media is on the media server in the basement… The drive is mostly for the OS. It's also quiet enough not to notice the seeks and scans. I have the feeling that the Automatic Acoustic Management isn't enabled so there's probably room for improvement there. Even without it, it's no louder than the HD TiVo next to it… And it's never bothered me.
HTPC Case - Antec Aluminum Veris Fusion Black 430 Micro ATX Media Center / HTPC Case with IR receiver
	Already plenty of reviews for the Antec Fusion V2 case - from the good and the bad. I'm going on the record as saying I love this case. It's beautiful and blends in with the rest of my home theater equipment. Installation was a breeze with the motherboard, hard drive and optical drive. I'll admit I'm not a cabling freak and if you poked your head into the side of the case you'd say I was a novice… It just isn't as important to me. It works and you're not going to see it. I'm not over-clocking so heat flow isn't an issue either. I will say that the hard drive really doesn't have any air flow around it… It's segmented in it's own compartment but it has plenty of room around it (enough for a second drive). The only goofy part (as also mentioned by others) is the LCD display. The software that comes with it (VFD or something) works okay. You'll want to scrap it and just grab the real iMON software from Soundgraph (current version is iMON_7_20_0502). It has all of the drivers and software baked into a much larger software offering. I was really, REALLY hoping that the two XBOX360 remotes that I have (one that came with the XBOX360 and the other that came with the HD DVD drive) would work with the built-in IR sensor. Nope. No-go. Only an MCE remote works with it. I was fooled into thinking that since the XBOX 360 had settings on it to use either remote type, so would this… Nada. I made a second purchase from NewEgg for a Microsoft A9O-00007 WinXP Media Center Infrared Remote Control and it worked great (in Vista Media Center). I believe there's some options to try and get it to work with other software components than just VMC - so I'll be checking into that as I go along. I just don't want to drop in the included IR receiver to get such functionality to work… A bit more on the LCD - some people have complained about the viewing of it - but you can dial down the contrast and it still looks great. The newer version of the software actually fixes the ability to change fonts. When you're playing back DVDs or MP3 files - the name of the media scrolls back and you really can see it from 6-8 feet away (I'm with Arial Bold right now… but will get some other cooler fonts in there to check it out). The dancing EQ works great with Vista Media Center or Winamp… I couldn't be happier with it. There was a catch around using the IR to turn on and off the computer with the remote. Essentially there are two power switch wires to hook up from the case to the motherboard. In reality you're supposed to take on plug and insert it back into the LCD and then daisy-chain that connection to the motherboard. I'll probably work that part out in the future as I'm currently only using the plug from the front-panel switch. I'd need to disassemble the entire front plate to get to the connections. Why they made it so hard and not installed from the factory this way remains a mystery for sure. Last part about the case is that it really is quiet. I have the two side fans on low (they have a internal fan switch for low, medium, and high) and the CPU at idle is still showing 30c & 26c for the CPU and 10c for the core. Once I get some Cacti graphs trending fan speed and temperature settings, I'll have a better idea about load conditions. I was actually rather hesitant to spend more money on the case than the motherboard, memory & CPU - but once it's done - it's done. And you will enjoy the look and usability of this case far past the time you pay the credit card bill. Main factors in this case decision was looks number one, and silence number two. Both exceeding my expectations.
Motherboard - GIGABYTE GA-MA78GM-S2H AM2+/AM2 AMD 780G HDMI Micro ATX AMD
	This was my first Gigabyte motherboard and I've been pleased with it so far. Being an Asus fan with a few motherboards, I chose this one primarily for the built in HDTV/HDMI/HDCP graphics card and the AMD chipset. Both combined have kept it a cool case while still providing great 1080p HD playback and decent 3D performance. (I'm a sucker for 3D screen savers and what not… Heck, even full screen Winamp Visualizations played back without a problem…) I didn't have any add-in cards to install so the whole setup was relatively simple. SATA hard drive and optical drive eased those connections. CPU, cooler and memory went in fine as well. A few points of caution (or wisdom…) Be sure to update your BIOS but remember to reset it to defaults when you're finished. I knew about the need to setup the BIOS first to use HDMI (the default is to output to DVI). Basically chicken or the egg - you need to use a DVI/VGA monitor before you can see the BIOS screens to enable HDMI. If you only have HDMI you'll never see… well - you get the idea. The problem I ran into was that I set it to HDMI, restarted, all worked well… Then updated the BIOS. HDMI still worked on reboot, but would stop working at random. Sometimes even restarting wouldn't work. Pulling and replacing the cables didn't always work either. When I did go back into the BIOS the video out was set back to DVI. Odd that it would "work" with HDMI (HDMI and DVI share the same components so you can only choose one or the other with your second display being VGA). Being frustrated and thinking my efforts for this motherboard were dashed - I set it back to HDMI and haven't had those random issues again. Audio over HDMI also caused me a few headaches. The drivers were all installed and showing up but failed to enable. No matter what I did I couldn't choose HDMI as an audio output. I could use the RealTech optical out to my receiver but I really wanted audio over HDMI to work. My expectations were to hook up all HDMI to the TV and the use the digital out from the TV to my receiver (My several years old receiver only has two optical inputs that will accept multi-channel audio… I have 3 sources!) Come to find out that revisiting the BIOS for the HDMI/DVI issue I described earlier fixed this same issue as well. Whew! Now I can switch between optical audio and HDMI by using the Sound control panel (it would be nice to output to both… but oh well!) That brings me to my last and somewhat painful issue. If I don't have my TV turned to the HDMI/PC input when the computer is booting… Or if I switch input selection when the computer is already turned on, I lose picture. At first I thought this was related to the screen saver putting the TV into sleep mode or some other logical explanation… But I can repeat the problem by switching to a different input as well. The only solution is to get up and pull the HDMI cable out of the back of the TV or computer and to plug it back in. Then it works… Until I switch inputs again. AGH! I know others have seen this issue so it's really the last issue I need to resolve. (Some say that the latest BIOS or video drivers fixed the issue for them… but it hasn't for me…) All in all, for a $90 motherboard (half the cost of my previous purchase - an ASUS P5B Deluxe, it's been rock solid. For an HTPC Mini-ATX board, it just "works" (minus the HDMI blanking issues). This seems to be the first of a new line of integrated motherboards that perform very well for the lost entry cost. Who would have thought that all of these features could be had for such a low cost? Even with additional features not being used like RAID and over-clocking - I've very happy with this selection as well.
Television Stand - Whalen Brown Cherry TV Stand
	This is really more around preference than anything else. I've looked around over the past few years to find my "perfect" stand for televisions and audio/video equipment. An "entertainment center" for the new millennium. With have a big real-projection television for years the only options were whole wall units costing thousands of dollars. The whole effort around this updated home theater was to lighten and thin out the bulkiness of such a setup… to blend in. More in a sense of space than in a visual perspective (really - how do you "hide" such equipment if you're using it every day?). My first thought (and still a possibility) was to simply install the TV on the wall… The crown jewels of any flat panel install. Classy in every way… Until you think about a few things. Availability of even mounting it on the wall (plaster walls and offset studs on an outer-facing wall), cord management, and the need to still have access to your audio/video equipment. Second thought was to find a nice stand to house a receiver, HD TiVo, XBOX 360, Wii, and an HTPC (with external hard drive). Those criteria were easy enough to find… Almost any stand can do that. But add the need to have a center channel speaker to blend in to the mix and the options to start to drop out pretty quickly. Queue the Best Buy experience (my love/hate relationship continues). Even though were purchased our TV at Best Buy, the selection of TV stands all missed the mark. Until, out of the corner of my eye, I found the Whalen Brown Cherry TV Stand. Not only did it have three-tier shelving, it included a mounting arm for flat-panels up to 60 inches (and up to 150 pounds). This soon became my reference selection to compare other stands and eventually became our choice. The solid cherry wood posts along with black glass and wooden shelves really look great with the black steel frame. Cable management is included and it's absolutely a solid piece of furniture when fully assembled. (Be sure NOT to tighten up the screws and bolts until you're almost finished!) Even though this is an HTPC review, the whole experience lends itself to our home theater efforts. Why go through the bother of assembling all of this equipment and effort if you're just going to make it look like a college dorm room? This stand is just the chocolate fudge icing on a great home theater - tying all of the pieces together to make it an enjoyable experience.
Blu-ray & HD DVD Playback Software - Cyberlink PowerDVD
	As mentioned earlier, the software that came with my Blu-ray/HD DVD drive really comes crippled. Fine if you're on a laptop or desktop without surround sound, but for a HTPC Home Theater setup you're really screwing your customers - especially without an upgrade path if I want to give you some dollars. Because of my need to have both HD formats available (isn't that why I purchased the LG dual format drive in the first place?) - I took a look at Corel's WinDVD 9 Plus as a player. Its story that it still supports both Blu-ray and HD DVD was something that sealed the deal for my dollars. (PowerDVD 8 dropped support for HD DVD. I did try the HD DVD hack but it killed the player each time I put an HD DVD video in and I haven't had the chance to troubleshoot…) Since WinDVD 9 has a trial (but not for HD media) I handed over $80 (a discount is included if you run the trial) and proceeded to try out t he glory of both formats. To my astonishment, green pixel corruption all over the place. Checkerboard flickers frequent enough in my viewing that there was no way to ignore it. (I might be able to… if I conned myself into it - but the Mrs. would have mentioned it as "why are those green things showing up… You spent how much on this new TV and computer to have green things on the screen?") I hunted for answers. Driver issues? I was running the latest Catalyst drives from ATI - 8.6. Then I saw this in the notes: Setting the desktop resolution to 1600×1200 or greater may result in green pixel corruption being noticed when playing certain games. This issue maybe noticed when using a system running Windows Vista and containing an ATI Radeon HD 2600 or HD 2400 series of product. Further details can be found in topic number 737-31150 I couldn't find topic number 737-31150 anywhere… but it sounds like a diagnosis. Since that issue was only under "Known Issues Under the Windows Vista Operating System" - I reluctantly dropped back and installed Windows XP Media Center 2005. After a few hours of that mess, installing the latest patches and drivers, I fired up my recently purchased WinDVD 9. Green pixels. AGH!!! Installed the OEM version of PowerDVD and in all of it's glorious audio deprivation, no green pixels. Perfect Blu-ray & HD DVD video playback. Not a hardware issue - but a software issue. (Sounds like my life in Enterprise Infrastructure! Oh wait… I work in software now! Doh!) Well - it could be a hardware AND software issue - but I could care less. I'm spending dollars for something that works so that WinDVD software is going back for a refund and I'm sticking with WinDVD. (Both version 7.3 & 8 it seems, however…) So I'm back to Vista Ultimate with Vista Media Center and Cyberlink for now… And it's working!

So that's my wrap up and first impressions of my first real HTPC. Granted, my XBOX 360 did quite well as a Media Center Extender so most of the "infrastructure" was already in place. Networking, media center components, audio, etc weren't an issue. Stemming from the arrival of our new flat-panel TV, it was a fun effort to bring an HTPC into the mix and to finish up a decent media viewing package.

With this last piece, I'm pretty wrapped up in terms of home theater changes for a while. It's true - we've called this room in our house "The Media Lounge" from the first day we moved in. It's where we watch movies and where I really get to listen to music at decent volumes. Curious about what else was already in place before the HTPC came along?

• Sony STR DE-945 550-watt Dolby Digital Receiver
• Paradigm Mini Monitor Main, (2) V2 (Front), (2) V1 (Rear)
• Paradigm 12" Powered Subwoofer PS-1200
• Paradigm Center Channel CC-370
• HD TiVo with 500 GB "My DVR" Expander
• Microsoft XBOX 360
• Nintendo Wii
• Sony Bravia KDL-52XBR4 52" LCD
• Berkline Powered Leather Home Theater Stadium Seats
• Media Server with 2 TB online storage
• Backup Server with 2 TB backup storage
• Dell PowerConnect 2716 16-port gigabit router with CAT6 in-wall connections

For some assistance, there's already a great number of resources available on the Internet. Be sure to check these places out:

• AVS Forum - The Official Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H RS780 mATX Thread
• Coding Horror - Building Your Own Home Theater PC (Reread this AFTER I picked up the motherboard… The comments are always as good as the articles since Jeff Atwood has great readership)
• Ars Technica - Ars System Guide: HTPC edition
• (More to come as I stumble across them… the GIGABYTE motherboard is pretty popular…)

Now it's time to go hide some more wires and perhaps convince C to allow my to run the speaker wires in the walls as well…

As part of my new work-from-home efforts, I received an HP All-in-One OfficeJet 6310 for my printing, scanning, and faxing needs. For a retail price of around $150, I was pretty skeptical. However, after a few days of using it I have to say I’m quite impressed with it’s printing abilities and my need for an occasional copy of a hotel receipt.

So I was recently saddened when a needed reinstall of my desktop Windows XP started throwing up errors when trying to print a test page to it. I’ve installed the network drivers several times… It’s a pretty straight forward effort. (And printing to my Brother HL-5250DN worked just fine…)

setup.exe -h HostName

Heck - that’s if you use the corporate drivers. The “home” drivers will even scan your network for the printer.

So - XP’s firewall was disabled, virus software was disabled - no errors messages on the printer driver install. I couldn’t even share to it when I was successfully able to install it on a different machine. What’s going on here?

Well - yes. I did one thing differently. I installed Windows XP SP3. Love the service packs.

A removal of SP3 left my computer is a bit of a mess since I had already installed a lot of programs and drivers after the SP3 install… But I was able to print. Instantly.

A quick Google the first time around didn’t show much promising hits. But I was searching specifically for issues related to the 6310. Come to find out that others are having the issue if you search for “network printing issues sp3” you’ll get a few stray users with similar problems… All inconclusive in the fix.

Well - I just didn’t have the problem to keep looking. I’m sticking with SP2 for now. I’ll let somebody else troubleshoot the problem this time around… (I’m guessing that my Brother laser printer is working since the printer itself has a network spooler built into it… I just connected to it via HTTP rather than through the HP software…)

Its been about 16 months since the last major computer purchase arrived at my house. That being said, I long debated on what the next addition to the family would be. First it was an internal discussion on the merits of PS3 versus HTPC (that would be Home Theater Personal Computer). That lasted for about 2 days and went something like this:

“I already have a Wii and an XBOX360… Do I need to pick up a PS3 as well?”

“You really like putting computers together… What would be the challenge of simply plugging something in and having it just work?”

“Do you even need anything at all?”

Essentially, C & I picked up a new Sony XBR4 52″ LCD Flat Panel television as part of our 1-year anniversary. Well, more like… I finally was able to sell my Mitsubishi 65″ rear-projection HDTV which seemingly was the only requirement needed to get a new flat panel. After that, the rest of the room just needed to be, ahem… “finished”. Except for making a decision on what stand our mount to pick up (I’m really leaning on a Whalen 52″ Tiered TV Console from, yes… Best Buy - and it’s on sale right now) - the last piece of the puzzle was to find a way to really good HD player without sounding like a cyclone was in the room. (Sorry XBOX360, you’re just too loud for our fancy TV…)

So yes, while we’ve been dazzled with HDTV for some 6 years or so, it was time to tidy up the cables and make a presentable showcase for our Home Theater efforts. So over the next few days (or so, hopefully) - I’ll detail out my efforts to complete a fairly reasonable HTPC equipped enough to handle playback of 1080p Blu ray or just about any other format known to man (I did pickup an HD-DVD drive for my XBOX360 - first time being on the wrong format for sure….)

For the components, I headed to my trusted friend, NewEgg (the best ever…) and placed my order today. What did I choose?

• CPU - AMD Athlon X2 4850e 2.5GHz 2 x 512KB L2 Cache Socket AM2 45W Dual-Core Processor
• Memory - OCZ SLI-Ready Edition 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory
• Optical Drive - LG GGC-H20L 16X Blu-ray/HD DVD drive
• Hard Drive - Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKS 500GB 7200 RPM
• HTPC Case - Antec Aluminum Veris Fusion Black 430 Micro ATX Media Center / HTPC Case with IR receiver
• Motherboard - GIGABYTE GA-MA78GM-S2H AM2+/AM2 AMD 780G HDMI Micro ATX AMD

There’s been a lot of great reviews posted about this great motherboard/CPU combination so I’m hoping for some great HDTV performance. No need to any fancy gaming as I leave that to my consoles or my older Dell 9100. I’m just looking at creating a nice, build-to-order Home Theater appliance that is fairly quiet (like my HD TiVo) and works (yes - I’m hoping that HDMI & HDCP just work flawlessly… They better!!) It’s also my first foray into AMD territory… But I’m liking the low power consumption and the quietness that should go along with it…

Stay tuned for more updates… And feel free to comment on your own experiences…

It’s been in the works for a while - but the last few weeks really just bothered me in that the performance of my Web hosting has been so dismal that I’ve finally upgraded to a dedicated virtual machine from MediaTemple.

I’ve sang the praises of MT before specifically around their GridServices offering - but more specifically around their transparency in discussing their own problems. However - even I have not been blind to their performance issues - now going on for the past 5 months or so…

While I’m sure that in “a few weeks” there will be an announcement of a new GS system (or some kind of new branding for it) - I just couldn’t wait any longer. I actually had been using GoDaddy’s virtual private server for these sites before moving to MediaTemple. But like all things technical in nature - their performance was terrible at the end. CPU utilization wasn’t contained in their shared environment and they didn’t seem to want to fix it. Will MT be any better in their offerings? Time will tell. So far I’ve been pretty happy in the difference. Load times are pretty fast and I have the access to install anything I want again (not that I really needed to… But I’ll probably start running my Cacti scripts with RRD up there again…)

One of the sad parts about this whole experience was the let down in support that I received from MT surrounding my efforts to stay on the GS system. While the performance was pretty lousy (so much that I started keeping my own monitoring stats on it) - I finally opened a ticket on January 16th, 2008 expressing my concerns and the data that supported it.

Hello… I’ve been tracking the response time of my Web site for several months now and it seems to have been getting slower and slower. I’ve only used 11 GPUs (on average) out of 1000 available per month. So I know I’m not a burden on the system by any means.

I’ve tracked response times both from my home Internet connection as well as other Internet monitoring sites and they go from half a second to over 10 seconds - some upwards of 20 seconds to respond for the same page - just seconds apart (refresh - no cache, etc.)

I’m curious to know how this wide deviation in response times from multiple locations for the same resources reflects on how the gird system is performing.

For the most part - it’s “ok” - but nothing near what I would have expected from a low-volume Web site such as mine on such a highly performing GRID cluster system.

And for this incident - it’s not just today or yesterday… I’ve been tracking this issues for about 40 days now. The average was around 4 seconds (still very slow) and now it’s closer to 8 seconds.

What did I get back? Yeah - the standard

We have actually noticed a possible network routing issue in our past support history to your area around St. Louis.

I think I coughed and said something under my breath…

This kind of bantering went on and on. A nice gem:

We sincerely appreciate you taking the time and effort to collect this data. We are aware that the (gs) is currently not in a perfect state of stability yet, but we are getting there. We are continuing to implement the re-architecture our storage segment in an effort to stabilize and increase the performance of this segment.

However, what really set me off was blaming my own Web site… A pretty lean WordPress install that may have upwards of two people a day looking at it (including myself…)

After speaking with our CTO, who has reviewed your data, we have come up with some possibilities of explaining what is going on.

While the hills and valleys in the data are expected over the past week of performance, which we are currently taking measures to resolve, we can’t attribute the increase in response time from the beginning of your monitoring to recent date to these issues.

We believe that you may have a growing database that may be not indexed properly or possibly a sessions directory that is growing and not be flushed properly. Either one of these cases could lead to the symptoms we are seeing.

Another possible issue could be plugins. You may want to try disabling some of our plugins to see if that improves the performance of your site as well.

We urge you to investigate the above and let us know if any of the above as helped.

Ummm… My response?

I’d like to take exception to the conclusions of your research. I have not changed any behavior of my database or the plugins and the performance of the Web site has not added a second (averaging 5 seconds now) than what it was last week.

I’ve actually done a performance of just an image and it’s performance stays pretty constant. - But even then - it’s sometimes 200 MS, sometimes 1000 MS - such a non-database driven request should be the same all the time (it’s only 60 KB in size). I’m going to do the same for a PHP info page and measure the results. And again, for the 1000 GPUs I have - only about 15 are used a month. My tables are very small and the system as a whole should be quite a bit faster…

And a last note - your conclusions about performance and databases would not explain why the request responses are anywhere between 800 MS to 8 seconds for a standard front page - they would be the same time all the time (based on the very low levels of GPU and traffic).

That’s right - with MT’s slogan for their GS services as:

I should have the power of hundreds! My 15 GPUs a month out of 1,000 seemed like I should be able to use a little more of my paid “horsepower” to server up some pages a bit faster. Even if it wasn’t faster - perhaps it could at least be consistent?

I turned to caching and limiting plugins just to do my due diligence:

I’ve now set up database tuning jobs, installed a WordPress cache plugin… And it’s still anywhere between 500 ms (with cached paged) to 15 seconds…

<!– Dynamic Page Served (once) in 15.196 seconds –>

I took a copy of my Web site, installed it (database and pages) on a VMWare Centos install and was able to get an average of 700 ms (not even using the cache plugin!!!)

So 15 seconds for your Grid system - 700 ms for my VMWare Linux install that averages a 3% CPU utilization.

Then silence from the support staff…

Your response: 2008/02/14 19:57
It’s been another 2 weeks and no response to my additional information. I’m still seeing between 150 ms to over 5 seconds for the same page from the same monitoring service. I’ve even gone with caching pages to try and improve performance… Is it time to move? How does this compare to a VPS?
Your response: 2008/02/20 21:06
Hello? Another week has passed…
Your response: 2008/02/24 07:16
4 more days…
Your response: 2008/03/02 11:30
7 more days
Your response: 2008/03/06 19:21
4 more days

It wasn’t for another 11 days after that one that I received word back from MT - March 17th. They said that my ticket wasn’t coming up in their system and did apologize. In the mean time, I did open up two more tickets referencing my first ticket which were in fact closed without answers…

So yes - MediaTemple’s Grid-Service isn’t ready yet. I read the reviews before hand - same issues, same problems. It was great when I opened my account for about a month and then was poor ever since… Never any consistency and rather unacceptable customer service. I actually had the chance to talk to my support technician on the phone and I will say that he was very intelligent, well spoken, technical and very aware of their internal storage subsystem problems. I asked him “Should I move to your DV system to rid myself of these issues? Or are you close to fixing them?”

I moved to a DV system.

As Fox Mulder once said:

How’s it working so far?

Before		After

I’ll check back in a bit and let you know…

BTW - 100th post! A bit far down the path from my first post back on July 23rd, 2006 - 631 days ago. Statistically speaking, I think I need to write more frequently! Almost once a week isn’t too bad…

There have been a few new additions to the family clan that I've been needing to talk about… It's been a long time coming, but we're now parents to a brand new Wii.

Now already being a long time XBOX camp member, the Wii was a nice addition for C and I to play some fun games together… (It was rather stressful playing racing car games with her!) Funny part of the story being that I asked a few of my friends to keep my eye out for them during their travels. It happens to be that two of them found them on the same weekend and purchased one for me. What would the odds be of that happening again knowing how hard they've been able to find? (They seem to be coming into their own again… being a bit more available now…)

C		D
		(I don't usually have my mouth hanging open like that!)

I've now spent enough time with WiiSports to become a pro at Bowling (just barely) and I'm making my way pretty well with Tennis… I just need to get C to put in some more time practicing!

Second up has been a real "Life Changer" - a shiny 16GB iPhone has also made it's way into my life.

Since starting my new job at HP I needed to become more connected with e-mail and it's works really well. Add the ability to sync my Microsoft Outlook information, a gorgeous screen for watching videos and a being a pretty decent phone it looks like I couldn't go wrong. (Notice I didn't say anything about how pitiful the EDGE network with AT&T is… - oh wait - I just did… ugh…) Of course, I'm sure that an even shinier 3G phone is just on the horizon but in reality - I'm not that much of a mobile network user… It works great with our home Wi-Fi which is where I use that kind of functionality the most…

With the introduction of my iPulp phone (yeah - I named it iPulp) - that meant it was time to let a few of my older iPods go… I've had my first few experiences with Craigslist and I have to say I've made out pretty well. My 30 GB black Video iPod went for a respectable $125 (of course - $300 new!) and I know that they're actually selling for more than that now. But it went to a better home! A few of my sound modules have also headed out to some other musicians and if I'm lucky - my 65" Mitsubishi HDTV might have a new home as well! Cross your fingers!

Well - that's my story for now (and I'm sticking to it!) We do have a big milestone coming up next post… That's right - #100 is coming up next… Oh whatever will I write about?