[rescue] Re: Re: OH YEA??? [was: Re: Ultra?]

[Dave McGuire]

On August 3, Robert Novak wrote:
> Naw, you'd be surprised how little benefit BIND gets from a scsi disk over
> an ide disk. Or Squid. Or xterm. Heck, the U5 270 I put up as DNS/web
> proxy 2 jobs ago (4 years ago I guess) is still cooking along with its
> original 4GB disk and 256MB RAM. Does its job, and that's more important
> than much else.

  Actually squid gets quite a bit of benefit from SCSI disk if it's a
heavily-used unit.  At Cidera (earlier when it was SkyCache) we tested
about thirty web caches, including maybe twenty different squid-based
web cache designs, with different combinations of cpu architectures
and peripherals.  The cache community was around 1500 seats.  It was
the perfect web cache test community...a building full of bankers
during the day...porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn.  Watching
those cache logs was amazing.

  But anyway, on FreeBSD and NetBSD PeeCees (~400MHz and lots of RAM)
and 164LX-based Alphas running NetBSD, we could get more than twice
the number of clients behind the cache before throughput started to
degrade.  The results varied from IDE adapter to IDE adapter, but it
was never less than twice the number of clients with SCSI.  The SCSI
host adapters in use were Qlogic QLA-1040s and Adaptec 2940UWs in
nearly all cases.

  (This is why I usually ignore the IDE vs. SCSI wars around here...I've
seen the difference in a very real-world situation, and no amount of
weenies-wanting-to-sell-me-on-cheap-IDE-disks conversations are going
to change that)

          -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire                     "I haven't worn pants in 14 months!"
St. Petersburg, FL                                   -Pete Wargo