Simple guide for load balancing and scaling on Amazon

Let’s say you have a simple website that you are expecting to go viral due to some news story or other potential viral type publicity. If you are hosted on Amazon, you have the capability to turn your little website into a monster with just a few clicks in the Amazon web console.

The first thing you have to know is what is powering your website. Are you running a database and is the database on the same server? We are going to assume you are running a simple database and site all on the same server.
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Removing the hiberfil.sys

By default Windows Vista and Server 2008 have a hibernation file equal to the size of the amount of memory you are using. Of you have 12GB of RAM, that will be a 12GB hiberfil.sys. If you are using a small SSD, that would be a killer waste. Removing this file is a quick way to free up HD space, although considering how cheap drives are, you could always upgrade. Furthermore if you are using a virtual machine, you probably don’t need this space wasted either.

Now I do not know why they do this on the Server version since who hibernates a server (that being said I am sure some people probably do, silly tree huggers). The real bugger with this problem is that shutting off hibernation does not always remove the hiberfil.sys file. Alternatively, what if you want to remove it without needing to reboot the server. I found a very fast and simple way to do this is to launch a command prompt as an administrator and run the following command:

powercfg.exe /hibernate off

The other way is to run the disk clean up utility, this will disable hibernation and delete the hiberfil.sys. Instructions on doing this are here.

Vista x64 Displays Wrong Physical Memory Size

This is a crazy little problem in Windows Vista x64 that shows the wrong information when the System Information (msinfo32.exe) is run. This issue occurred on a computer that was upgraded from 4GB of DDR3 (4x1GB) ram to 8GB (4x2GB) of DDR3, running Windows Vista Ultimate x64.

What happened is the Installed Physical Memory displayed correctly at 8.00GB, but the Total Physical Memory only reported as 4.00GB and Available Physical Memory reported as 5.22GB. View the screenshot of this output below.

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OpenOffice 3.0.1 Has Been Released

OpenOffice 3.0.1 has come out 2 days earlier than expected. You can get it on the P2P portion of the OpenOffice website, or you can download the torrent here here.

For those that do not know what OpenOffice is, read more about it here. OpenOffice could do to Microsoft Office what Firefox has done to Internet Explorer. It has come a long way from being a bloated java application to a more than suitable alternative to Microsoft Office. About the only thing OpenOffice is still not great at is spreadsheets, it will not replace Excel for the power spreadsheet user or so I have been told.

4 Ways to Launch the Task Manager

The simplest and fastest way to launch the Windows Task Manager is to hit:

CTRL+SHIFT+ESC

The second way is:

CTRL+ALT+DELETE

Then select Task Manager from there.
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