Archive for March 18th, 2010

Arigeitsu got a workout today

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

One of the sites hosted on Arigeitsu found itself on Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon today… ouch! I’ll let the bandwidth graph speak for itself:

lol bandwidth

Okay, so it’s not some huge numbers, but it’s pretty good for that server. I’m going to take a guess that my Apache configuration abilities are up to snuff, considering the server load average didn’t appear to go above ~1.50 all day, and Nagios didn’t notice any failing HTTP requests.

My main concern was the port becoming saturated – one of the reasons we’re hoping soon to get a dedicated web server and then Arigeitsu will do nothing but host Mumble servers. If it went above 100mbps at all, then the Mumble traffic on that server would go to hell in a handbasket for the duration of the time, and it’d cost us quite a bit in credits for the affected users. The only reason we haven’t dropped the money on a new web server yet is because Duncan isn’t very far away from arriving, and I don’t want to put us in a hole financially in case we have to take a few days off after he gets here.

On a side note, my blog is getting hammered with spam lately – almost a thousand spam comments this week… seems like it happens every time you mention something to do with “weight loss”, you get crap links like “diet supplement review” rammed down your throat constantly. Thank god for Akismet!

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God of War 3

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

So God of War 3 came out a few days ago, and my brother in law managed to pick up a copy… naturally, while he was at work I absconded with it. I need to wholeheartedly agree with a comment one reviewer made early on – to paraphrase, if you bought a PS3 specifically for GoW3, you got your money’s worth.

The game is epic in the purest sense of the word – it might be the most beautiful video game I’ve ever played, giving FF13 a run for it’s money at first, then edging it out once you disqualify what is essentially an interactive movie for the most part (I know, I know, flamebait, whatever). No, this is a game that really starts to show what the PS3 is made of.

The first “level” – climbing up Mt Olympus and doing battle with leviathans and shit is absolutely sublime. The Titans are equally impressive, especially on a large TV – and the sound effects with Dolby Digital and a good sub are flawless… the word one keeps arriving back at is “Epic”.

I’m nowhere near finished the game – I’m hardly a veteran of the franchise having (shamefully) never played the first two, and because I’ve been burning through games at an alarming rate I’m only playing it on “Titan” difficulty (which should earn me an extra two gold trophies at the end of the experience) so it’s a bit of a slog to get through it.

The demo was grand, but the game proper is sublime. Everything about the gods is larger than life, and it’s all rendered beautifully – watching Kratos open a pair of 50′ doors as easy as I’d open my exterior shutters… hearing the huge creaks echoing all around me in 5.1… being accosted by a giant minotaur before drawing it at the end of the battle… using a mile-high titan as a battlefield…

… surely this is what games are supposed to be made of. I can’t wait till I’ve finished it.

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