Communication – Important But Also Unproductive

One thing that I have been thinking about for quite some time is the topic of communication. Communication is very important in many aspects of our lives and it is what our society is built upon.

I witness employees here doing a lot of “socializing” and talking about things that simply have nothing to do with work. I find myself a bit apalled by this type of socializing in the environment unless it is during breaks or lunches. While I am not the most productive person in the company by no means, there are other individuals that simply don’t get much done. When other employees come up to speak with me, I have no troubles with this as long as it is business related or just a short question about a home computer problem. But what I do have troubles with are individuals whom hover around, watching everything you do, and sort of repeat the same ideas over and over. I find that this takes an extreme bite in my productivity, and I must stay on task and get things done.

The last hour of work typically is quite busy after the main “admin ticket” guy is done for the day, so I usually pick up on these tickets for the last hour. However, during this same time, there are multiple interruptions that are not business-related and are mostly a social-type nature conversation. I will admit, many of these I sort of ignore for the most part because it doesn’t interest me – or I have many things on my plate at the same time.

Don’t Let Memory Fool You…

Quite a while ago, I upgraded the memory in the Paris server. I was thinking that it wasn't exactly needed because the memory monitor still showed that there was at least 100 MB of the memory available.

The Paris server was built with a 1 GB memory stick for later expansion if needed. I installed another 1 GB memory stick on the server, and to my surprise, there is now only about 300 MB of free memory after the server is on for at least 24 hours.

So, out of 2 GB of memory that was installed, it is using 1.7 GB of it. How did it survive with only 1 GB installed? I guess it was using the swap file (virtual memory) on the server more than it was reporting. Or maybe now that more memory is available, the server is taking advantage of storing more data for quicker retrieval.

RAM operates in nanoseconds (ns) for access times. Hard drives also operate in nanoseconds as well. However, memory access times are much faster than hard drive performance. Therefore, this memory upgrade improved system performance all around.

Josh with Midwest First also installed more memory in his web server. He only had 256 MB starting out and added more. His website loading times reduced dramatically.