"December 30, 2004 - 00:00 UTC
Here's a quick end-of-the-year current status of things:

A few modifications to the database made on Monday caused it to slow down
significantly (far more than expected). But this didn't really become
noticeable until today. A lot of queries were backing up - at one point
this morning we were unable to send out any work due to the backlog. As of
now, things are slow but manageable - you may still find the web site a
little more sluggish than usual. We're working on it.

We're hastily getting two new big servers on line. One will be the new BOINC
database server. Our current server is maxed out at 2 old CPUs and 2 GB
RAM. This new server will start with 2 CPUs that are 5 times faster and 8
GB RAM. Plus it has the ability to grow by 2 more CPUs and double the RAM
if demand is high. As well, attached to it will be a hardware RAID for much
faster disk I/O. The current server will then become the replica server. We
need to get this working in order to keep up with increased demand as users
migrate from classic SETI@home to BOINC.

The other server a Sun E3500 similar to our current E3500 which holds the
master database (where all the scientific results are stored after they are
validated). The storage on the current database is slow, bulky, and almost
full. We will put much larger, more efficient disk arrays on the new E3500
and then transfer the database to it. This will vastly improve the speed of
our back-end scientific analysis."