Technology is not far behind from what is in demand these days and apparently this includes creating peripherals that are in demand. Computer chips and processors are known to be one of the important parts of making technology and computing work and with that, Intel has revealed its first eco-friendly chips, the Xeon processors.

Doing its part towards the global warming phenomena, Intel is sure to get a large demand for these new eco-friendly Xeon chips. It has been customary to find people always wanting to be the first in having these new gifts of technology and with chips being at the forefront, all else is bound to follow as far as bundling and making these things available in the market.

Servers and common desktops are bound to be the main flagship of these new Intel processors and surely, both private and commercial groups in need of upgraded and eco-friendly technology are bound to see what this new installment offered by Intel truly has to offer.

The latest processors include three quad-core products: X5492, X5470, and L5430. The fastest of the chips has a clock speed of 3.4 GHz, while the low-voltage version uses 50 watts of power per core. The fourth new processor is the X5270, which runs as low as 80 watts with frequencies as high as 3.5 GHz.

The chips are aimed at manufacturers of workstations, blade servers, and mainstream servers, and are drop-in compatible with existing Intel dual-processor platforms that have been in the market since 2006. “Customers using these new Xeon processors will not only benefit from greater performance and energy efficiency within existing platforms, but they will be the very first to use Intel’s halogen-free technology,” Kirk Skaugen, VP and general manager of Intel’s server platforms group

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We’ve been working on moving to a new server all week, and we’ve just finished the transition. Best of all, we’ve switched to the new servers without any downtime in-between. Our new server is a 1.86 GHz Core 2 Duo and with 3GB of DDR2 RAM - all thanks to the awesome guys and gals at Lunarpages, the best host there is.

A lot of work has gone into this transition in hopes of raising the performance - and more importantly, the reliability - of our server. In the past year (since we first started our hosting with LP), we’ve gone from several million hits a month to dozens of millions, and our old server took quite a hit. To that end, we’ve focused on deploying lightweight and highly-optimized code all around; hopefully there will be no more un-expected downtime… ever.

Our current software setup is very complicated, but hopefully it’ll take us all the way to 0.00 minutes of downtime - that’s our goal! We have multiple application servers and programs running in the background each doing what they best - instead of the traditional have-the-web-server-do-it-all way. At the moment, we currently have a software stack comprising of a tightly-knit mesh of these products:

Congratulations are in order for Microsoft’s IIS development team - today they’ve just announced the public availability of the final version of the IIS-FastCGI ISAPI Extension - a long-awaited and much-improved way of running just about any open-source scripting engine on IIS, safely and quickly.

This FastCGI module for IIS 5.1, 6, and 7 (with Windows Vista and Server 2008) have been in the works for quite a while now, and we’ve been using them since the first beta release - they’re good. While the biggest benefit will be seen in using FastCGI w/ IIS7 to take advantage of the new kernel-mode caching, it’s still a huge improvement over the old way of running scripting engines for languages like PHP on Windows.

The Problem: Most open-source scripting engines like PHP and Ruby on Rails were initially developed on/for the *nix world. On Unix-based platforms, the easiest way of creating multi-threaded applications is just to run the same app twice or more (The CGI model). On Windows, that doesn’t work out so well, because it takes a lot more resources to create another process. So these engines released Windows-specific single-process multi-threaded engines; the only problem was, they weren’t stable. Too many race conditions in some very non-thread-safe code wreaked havoc on many Windows systems, with the PHP developers themselves giving “Stability on IIS” the lowest level of concern.

For all the Windows-bound PHP users out there, consider yourselves warned: even if you’re running the (supposedly) thread-safe PHP Win32 binary redistribution, you’re still susceptible to PHP Access Violation Errors, race problems, heap corruption, and much worse if you use the popular eAccelerator opcode-caching extension.

We did our testing with the binaries compiled by SiteBuddy using the latest versions of both PHP and eAccelerator. Almost immediately after initiating a stress test on our test servers we experienced the dreaded “PHP Access Violation” error - which brings down the entire IIS Worker Process to its heels.