VanLUG Email Archive
Rick Franchuk (rickf@transpect.net)
Thu, 22 Oct 1998 13:54:39 -0700 (PDT)
On Thu, 22 Oct 1998, Vincent Janelle wrote:
> A Ultrasparc, dending if you have IDE or not, running solaris and apache,
> is capable of more hits/second than a Linux box of hardware from the same
> time era.
>
> It also depends on if you have more than one processor in there, how fast
> it is, if you've more than one processor, how much ram... Perhaps you
> should provide some more stats as to what kind of hardware you're running
> in that ultrasparc.
>
> If you're looking for serious(really serious) hits/sec, PCs don't have
> enough memory bandwidth, but for the cost of one ultrasparc vs the cost of
> a cluster of PCs is different :) The PCs could probably do more.
>
> Note, by the # of hits/sec, I'm talking about something about the level of
> microsoft's website or simplenet.
Comparison of one type of box to another is fine if the costs are similar,
but Sun hardware consistantly costs 3 or 4 times more per cycle nowadays...
the focus most people fixate on is on the cost/performance ratio.
You're making the assumption that the kind of hits aren't something that can
be easily spread around or mirrored. If all you're doing is pushing out
static content, setting up proxies with a round-robin DNS or NAT box to point
to one of your commodity boxes is going to yield a far lower
cost/hits-handled ratio vs. Big Hardware, even if you splurge for one of
those spoovy-keen NAT and failover switch type devices.
The only time when big hardware beats out small hardware is in an environment
of extremely high CGI use where mirroring data the CGI uses isn't feasable
for commodity machines (say, a 1Tb database that gets bombarded with 100s of
queries a second). In a situation like that though, the data source itself
would best be put on a beefy box dedicated to that service, and front ends
for queries could be implemented on commodity boxes to reduce overhead for
common queries and funnel whatever's left to the archive.
Most websites don't have problems like this, though. ;)
--
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| Rick Franchuk - TranSpecT Consulting |
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