i've finally started looking at actionscript 2.0, which was introduced way back in flash MX 2004. yes, i am behind the times. it looks a lot more java-like, and less javascript-like, although apparently it's based on stuff proposed in early draft specs of the next version of ECMAScript.

i haven't tried coding anything in it yet. as a longtime java programmer, i'm sure it won't take long for me to get used to, but i think i'll miss the freewheeling, uber-dynamic, prototype-based style of actionscript 1. plus, i'll have to keep mentally switching gears as i go back and forth between actionscript coding and javascript coding.

for the last week or so the main bunnyherolabs.com server had been experiencing connection issues–stylesheets and images would fail to load, ssh login attempts would time out or be refused outright, mysql connections would fail randomly, emails wouldn't send, etc. etc. it seemed to happen only under heavy load. when i inspected /var/log/messages, it was full of No buffer space available errors.

to google i went. i read some suggestions to run netstat -m to see how many buffers short i was running. however, the output of that command indicated that i wasn't actually running out of mbufs??

other people with this problem seemed to have solved it by replacing the network card. i may eventually ask my hosting provider to do that (layered technologies, who are awesome, by the way) if the problem crops up again.

i ended up resolving it (apparently) by sending more of my traffic to the second server i recently rented (petimage.bunnyherolabs.com). for example, most of my <img> tags are now pointing there. i wonder if i'm simply hitting the limits of the hardware… i guess we shall see?