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

[James Lockwood]

On Sun, 4 Aug 2002, Dave McGuire wrote:

> On August 3, Chris Hedemark wrote:
> > I agree, for a real server application like a 1,500+ seat squid
> > deployment, a U5 with IDE just doesn't cut the mustard.
>
>   We can agree on that at least.

Interestingly enough, the Harvest Cache (from which Squid was derived)
outperformed a gutsy at the time SS5 with...  a 486/100 IDE laptop.  The
laptop was a live demo machine for proto-NetCache.

That said, where tps is critical you'd be a fool to choose a box with a
small number of IDE spindles.

>   I don't know anyone who does "light" development work.

I did "light" development work on a U5 for two years.  Specifically, I
developed document classification algorithms operating in 2.05E+07
dimensional space which consumed about 400MB of RAM per document, and
webcrawling software to feed it.  With a gig of RAM it was a reasonably
useful machine

The production boxes for the classifier were a quad of 4-way E450's, but
we ended up running quite a bit of production code on U5's and U10's.
These ran mostly Apache and Weblogic, and as they hit the disk only rarely
they performed well.  Everything was redundant so individual unit
reliability was much less of a concern.

The U5/U10 cut many corners to hit a low price point.  If these corners
don't impact you, they're not bad boxes.  We got them at a huge discount,
needed the CPU power but not much I/O.  Boxes that needed I/O were bigger
SMP UltraSparcs hooked up to RAID arrays.

>   You may be willing to settle for something that's "good enough".
> I'm not.

James' Capacity Planning 101:

Everything is "good enough" for someone, overkill for someone else, and
insufficient for someone else.  Everything has a nonzero possibility of
failure.  There are no absolutes, so buy what solves the problem.  If you
can anticipate future requirements then make an effort to fit them in, but
overreliance on upgrades or buying capacity before you have to can work to
your detriment.

-James