[geeks] value of PIII PC servers

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Thu, 22 Jun 2006, Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:

>> Depending on the application, 2 Gigs of RAM can be quite reasonable...
>
> Absolutely NONE of my customers have bought less than a 2GB RAM system
> for web hosting/colocation in the past year.

2GB of memory for spewing data out tcp/80?  What in the -world- for?  Do
they want to cache all of the document tree in memory permanently?  Or
are they using some abominably inefficient CGI or J2EE code?  Or are
they just running Windows?

My main Unix system has 4GB of memory.  It runs all my interactive jobs
(as well as those belonging to 3 or 4 other people), hosts 2 - 3 SAS
sessions, 2 - 4 Mathematica sessions, a decent amount of PostgreSQL, and
NFS/SMB serverly things (with a fair amount of activity), and it still
has over 2GB free.

And this is on -Solaris-, no less, the supposed pig-beast of all Unixes!

> One bought a 16GB RAM dual-Opteron system, another, an 8GB RAM system.

If I had to buy a computer with 16GB of memory to serve up web pages, I
think the last thing I'd do is brag about that fact.  There is something
dreadfully wrong with that concept.

Oh well, I guess it at least drives down the memory prices for folks who
can use it more efficiently.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke    )   "A man who never dreams goes slowly mad."
Elgin, TX           (      --Thomas Dolby, "Valley of the Mind's Eye"