You might notice on the right navigational bar the addition of a nifty new ‘Server Load’ display. It was devised as a means to display the current strain on my server after noticing the large amount of bandwidth spent lately (due to the popularity of the Geology lab photos). The ‘System’ tab displays the current amount of RAM in use, which judges how hard the 200MHz machine is crunching the PHP/MySQL requests. The ‘Bandwidth’ tab is supposed to measure the speed of upload over the last 10 seconds; however; it does not seem to be functioning correctly at the present time.
The tab is displayed via the use of a great [free] program called Samurize Server. It basically takes data that I configured it to check up on, puts it on a nice pre-rendered photochopped picture I designed, and finally saves the whole as an image somewhere onto the root of my HTTP server. The webpage then makes use of the image.