At work my main project is a database and web front-end hosted on a mostly Microsoft platform. We’ve got dual load-balanced Windows 2000 machines running IIS and PHP connected to a SQL Server 2000 cluster. This setup used to be maintained by a system adminstrator who was our go-to-guy when anything seemed slow or we needed anything done with the boxes. However, this guy was recently absorbed into the main corporate IT group. So, in recent months our support has been almost non-existent and we’ve now been assigned as the administrators of these servers. This is something for which I have had almost no training and about the same amount of prior experience. And of course, right around the time that this happens, our application starts slowing down and we find users are having issues accessing the data and making the necessary updates.

Now, I know Windows and I would consider myself a power-user but keeping these servers in tip-top shape and running well is a tough job. After doing a bunch of research using almost every available online resource, it appears that MS has really not configured these systems to run well “out of the box”. There are so many recommended tweaks and options, it’s amazing to me that this thing was running at all! My partner and I have spent the last two weeks making change after change hoping to see some noticeable performance increases. There has been some mild improvement, but we’re still searching for the holy grail of SQL Server tuning!

So, the lack of recent blog updates is due, in part, to my working pretty much non-stop from about 7:30am to 4pm each day and then going back after the kids go to bed. Coupled with this is the fact that there really hasn’t been too much to write about. This is a good thing.