Finally...

So I lost a client yesterday, and said client was the one that went nuts if her web site was offline for 10 seconds. Given my new found freedom what is the first thing I did?

Pushed the 8.0 Upgrade and held my breath!

The process went smoothly enough, with an odd hangup while the box rebooted. The kernel initialized normally, but hung up on "checking root filesystem". Which gives me a bit of pause and reason to test this thing's hard disk later... Anyway, a quick power cycle and the reboot completed normally, updates finished applying themselves and 8.0 was hot.

The new bandwidth control module, and session viewers have already helped me isolate and remove some errant UDP traffic that was causing intermittent connection issues on my cable pipe. All apparently some torrent thing that Steam uses... yet another common traffic trend to keep an eye on.

I've attached a composite screen capture of last nights report, you can see the CPU and memory spike when I pushed the upgrade button. You can also see a rather significant reduction in page file utilization. Memory stats after the upgrade appear to be more consistent than before. I'm at a loss as to why, unless this new kernel has some updated memory management I'm unaware of. Or we have a memory leak somewhere that eats some ram up, this unit doesn't get rebooted unless an upgrade asks for it, or I run out of battery.

This unit now has 2.6.22-15, 2.6.26-1, 2.6.26-2 Linux kernels on it, the boot menu is rather full. If my memory serves correctly this server has been sequentially upgraded from 6.2 to current without issue.