Create a Service in Windows

There are only a few things I hate more than SPAM.  Only a few.

Anyway, I’ve been migrating to my new server and with that comes email.  And, of course, with email comes SPAM filtering.  So, I’ve been trying to run SpamAssassin.  Luckily, someone ported SA to Windows.  But, in this case, you have to run the executable or the filtering doesn’t happen.

Now, any self-respecting admin won’t stay logged into his server 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  That’s where services come in.  Here’s a nice little (easy) write up for creating your own service in Windows.  Best of all, it was written by Microsoft.

A note: this article says it’s for 2003 and below (and does mention anything about 64-bit).  I’ve just finished installing spamd.exe as a service on my machine and it works fine.  That said, I offer no warranties or gaurantees this will work for everyone.  Alternatively, there is this from Microsoft’s K nowledgebase – I just didn’t have access to the resource kit at the time.  Happy spamming.

MyISAM vs. InnoDB

So, recently, I’ve switched my blog (and the whole domain, consequently) to IIS.  I used to have my domain hosted over at Host Gator (highly recommended if you don’t have the resources to host your own content), but recently have switched to IIS running 2008 x64 on a virtual guest at work.  So far, I like it.

However, I was disappointed to find that WordPress performed poorly at first.  Then, in my tinkering, I figured out (dumb luck, eh?) that if I switch the tables in the WP database from InnoDB to MyISAM, performance increased noticeably.  I’m not sure if this was the “real” reason WordPress was sucking it up, but it seemed to fix it immediately.

Edit March 10, 2008:

I’m not sure how much of a performance boost this gave me.  I’m noticing a slowdown again, so I’m not sure if this did anything at all.  It looked like it was helping when I first made the change, but now I can’t be so sure.  Anyway… Continue reading