#32977: — 07/27  at  04:21 PM
How much RAM do you have installed? It would probably be more cost-effective to upgrade your RAM. Maybe your drive is busy because the web server is causing 'paging' of main memory to disk. Web servers are generally RAM intensive. You have a G5, right? You should have at least 2GB of RAM, and you can go up to 8GB. The more, the merrier!

#32980: PZ Myers — 07/27  at  04:45 PM
I've got 2GB. It probably would be cheaper than a hard drive to go up another 2GB.

#32982: Chris Clarke — 07/27  at  04:50 PM
It's 90-125 bucks per gig these days.

Tip jar time?

#32983: No More Mr. Nice Guy! — 07/27  at  04:56 PM
Maybe you were hit by a wave of websurfers from the TN-VA Tri-Cities area (wherever the hell that is)...

#32985: Kevin B. — 07/27  at  05:10 PM
I was gonna say, RAM is usually the bottleneck. If your disk starts going wacko at a certain level of load, that probably means you're experiencing a lot of paging (ram swapping out to disk) due to not all the processes fitting in RAM at once.

#32986: PZ Myers — 07/27  at  05:11 PM
I really want to avoid getting into the blegging business. I'm fortunate to have a stable job, and I'd feel awful getting donations for some tech gear when there are children going hungry and families scrabbling to make ends meet.

#32999: — 07/27  at  07:03 PM

I'm fortunate to have a stable job

... mucking out after the creationist animals have soiled the place ...?

#33012: PZ Myers — 07/27  at  08:38 PM
That's called job security, baby.

#33021: coturnix — 07/27  at  10:46 PM

I'm fortunate to have a stable job

...as in a "job down at the stables"... (I think was what SEF meant)

#33047: — 07/28  at  08:05 AM

Maybe you were hit by a wave of websurfers from the TN-VA Tri-Cities area (wherever the hell that is)...

The TN-VA Tri-cities are: Johnson City, TN; Kingsport, TN and Bristol, TN/VA (straddles the border). It's just over the mountains from us in Boone, NC, in the NE corner of TN.

Was just there on Monday, visiting the Gray fossil site, a neat, newly discovered Miocene locality:

http://members.aol.com/Graysite1/index.html

Neil

#33092: — 07/28  at  02:49 PM
You're a content provider (good content, too) and deserve compensation.

Doesn't mean you'll get it, but it isn't a choice as between hungry children of unemployed parents and pharyngula.org.

I am a content provider, too, and I too have job security and decent income. And don't directly get paid for a lot of the content I provide.

The problem is not, as I see it, blegging, but devising reasonable accommodation for remuneration of people who provide desirable content via novel channels.

Sorry, I haven't the slightest idea how to go about fixing that.

But no need to beat yourself up aver it.

I occasionally contribute money to blogs I frequent, but not so much since asking one (after contributing $25) how much of his bandwidth expenses I'd covered and learning that I had covered him for about a year.