The point is, we're all supposed to be working together here, right, to make LJ a better place. Let's all take a deep breath, relax, and see if we can't get back to doing that, huh?
Visions: relax. I dunno about the others, but I do value your comments. It'd be nice if they'd come with a little less attitude, but it's a price worth paying to get them if need be. I also think that you've done some good shit with the windoze client, don't drop that just because of a little hissy fit.
Dormando: Yeah, yeah, visions comes off as a bitch sometimes, but he's got some really good points. I'm not an endless source of knowledge about everything, and frankly in some ways he's better qualified than me. One thing that makes me attractive to employers but a little less attractive to a place like this is that I've built a lot of big sites - but built them with pretty big hardware, too. Some of that has been out of choice, some out of necessity, whatever - but I'll admit I've built 99% of my databases on big honkin' Sun boxes, where frankly you just aren't going to max out your cpu/mem nearly as quickly as i/o. Visions has a point - on the lower end servers used on LJ, you're going to peg the server a lot faster than you are the disk i/o. RAID 5 might just do what we need. Maybe it won't, but it's worth looking into, esp. if it'll cut the price in half. Again, when you're handed a budget of $500,000 (or $100,000, or whatever), you really don't sweat a $5K difference in arrays. When the budget is $10,000 or $20,000, 5K is suddenly critical. I'm not saying RAID 10 is a bad choice, I still think it'd work quite nicely - but it may be overkill for the situation. I dunno, we need some stats. Damnit, Jim, I'm a sys admin, not a fortune teller!
Everyone else: c'mon, play nice. We've all got our personal issues, we've all got our stress, and we're all trying to help. I'll leave it at that.