Phillip Pearson - web + electronics notes

tech notes and web hackery from a new zealander who was vaguely useful on the web back in 2002 (see: python community server, the blogging ecosystem, the new zealand coffee review, the internet topic exchange).

2008-7-21

Great timing, Amazon!

So last night I thought I'd take a crack at clearing out all the spam that's keeping me from re-enabling comments on this blog (the database is 1.5G - far too large for my little 256M server to handle). Not wanting to wait for the whole DB to download to my system at home, I pushed a copy of it to S3 and spawned a "large" EC2 instance, then enjoyed working on a system with 7.5G of RAM, plenty to hold the whole DB in cache and leave lots of room for sorting, the key buffer etc.

Encouraged by the experience, I'm thinking I should move more of my stuff over there. This little server is going to get much more expensive sometime next year as Layered Tech just raised their prices, to the point where EC2 would be cheaper and give me more RAM to play with.

So this morning, I started up an EC2 instance to work on, logged in, ran my script to install all the stuff I need to work on the project, then started getting "503 Service Unavailable" errors when trying to download the DB image from S3. Huh?

Oh - looks like I picked the day before a huge S3 outage to become a convert. D'oh!

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