The Things You Get Used To

Here’s a conversation I listened to in a recent meeting. I’m paraphrasing here - crossed arms and an expression of abject horror did not allow for accurate note taking.

"Our AGS has been as slow as a turtle that was hit by a car and then shot."

There's almost zero traffic on that AGS. Count: 1

"We're going to fix the poor performance by going to 2 AGS servers."

I have my doubts about that. Count: 2

"We'll host the AGS apps themselves on another server entirely to keep them from slowing down our AGS servers."

Count: 3

"But we'll still need a AGS 9.3 box for the apps we can't upgrade right now [read: loser connectors like .NET and Flex]."

Count: 4

"Whoa! We'll need test boxes for AGS 9.3 and 10."

Count: 6

"We want to move the ArcIMS Server to 10."

Count: 7

"But there are some apps that can't move right now [read: loser connectors like ActiveX]. We'll still need a ArcIMS 9.3 box."

Count: 8

"And test environments for ArcIMS 9.3 and 10!"

Count: 10

"Don't forget the 2 ArcIMS boxes that support that one high-volume site."

Count: 12

"And since we can't get everything on ArcGIS 10 for the foreseeable future, we'll have to support SDE 9.3 and 10 servers. 9.3 clients can't connect to SDE 10."

Damn it Esri, I though you had the SDE backward compatibility thing figured out. Count: 14

"Gotta have a SDE test environment. Just gotta."

Count: 15

For the record, our high-volume open source web app server and PostgreSQL/PostGIS server come in at a count of 2, and they run like their asses are on fire. We have a score of test boxes, but I don’t count those - they are our developers’ PCs.