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wcarchive Upgraded
aqua writes "Just noticed that ftp.cdrom.com, renowned for being the single biggest/fastest FTP server in history, yesterday quietly received its first hardware upgrade in two years -- the old machine was a single PPro200 / 2GB RAM; it's now a Xeon500 / 4GB. Software and disk stayed the same. Nice to see such a venerated old server get some more ponies under its hood. For the first time it also includes a credit for where they buy their hardware. The message is here. " The good news is that the max. user limit is 5000 now - I hope they have the bandwidth for it. And phil thinks he sends out a lot of data.
Linux (as far as I know) can't handle more
than 2GB (or is it 1GB?). That's a shame because
FreeBSD evidently can use 4GB (2^32). When
Linus is asked about this memory limitation
of Linux, he typically answers: "Use a 64-bit
processor". IMHO, that's not a good answer.
32-bit architecture is not dead yet. Linus
should consider this limitation as a serious
deficiency of Linux and work on fixing it
rather than saying "Use Alpha". In fact Xeon
memory address bus is probably higher than
32-bit and so a OS running on Xeon should be
able to handle higher than 4GB RAM.
Some friends of mine are network engineers at the facility where wcarchive colocates. It has full-duplex 100MB Fast Ethernet, direct to a backbone router that peers with just about every major network in the same room. Nice. Count me in.
FreeBSD, of course!
Uh, haven't you seen adds on other commercial internet things, like WEBSITES? CDROM.COM doesn't sell hardware, so just like other websites do, they can make a buisness decision and accept a hardware add on thier site, the and thier ftp site is obviously a high traffic site. That's why.
The only issue is, that even though you know that these pieces of hardware WORK, you don't know they work together. And yes, when you buy a preassembled PC from a good manufacturer, you DO know exactly what you get.
And warranties are better for a LOT more than just not wanting to open the machine up. I've had many a time where some WEIRD problems showed up and nothing I tried work, but calling tech support fixed it in about 10 minutes. A large computer manufacturer has simply seen it all and can help you with almost anything.
I may be misremembering, but I think Sequent had systems with 4GB per NUMA-Q node (and, I suspect, probably allowed each node to access memory in the other nodes) before Xeon Warrior Princess was out.
The MMU trick to handle more than 4GB (not 2GB) of main memory dates back to the Pentium Pro; it wasn't introduced in the Xeons. The support chips for Xeon may have introduced features to handle more than 4GB of physical memory, but that's a different issue (and folks such as Sequent may well have rolled their own support chips).
The two gig limit is a x86 limit; try putting more then two gigs on a non-xenon system.
:)
Xenon's have a hack to see more then two gigs, and if you take the word of the Linux kernel hackers it's a very ugly hack.
If you want more then two gigs in linux get a Alpha, it's already 64 bit. On the HIGHER end motherboards Alpha has a much better memory subsystem.
I am not a Alpha bigot, I just play one on slashdot.
"Think of it as evolution in action."
They probably didn't give credit to the PC Manufacturer before because from the looks of the old pics, it looked generic. I assume the last was a frankenstein machine build up. I guess they didn't feel like slappin another together this time 'round and picked up a Micron. Personally I like puttin together my PC, part of the fun..., but for biz use I generally like to buy the kind that's already put together..generally takes some hassle out of the process.
-Booya "No Try Not. Do or do not, there is no try." -Yoda
last fall, the disk space was upgraded to half a terabyte, so it really isnt the first upgrade in 2 years.
Maybe I'm just totally missing something there, but your numbers seem to make no sense whatsoever (especially since your required bandwidth figure was twice as big at 2500 users vs. 5000). It's like this:
- pretend everyone was connected at 28.8 kbps
- this is 3.6 K (kilobytes, not bits) per second
- if there are 5000 people @ 3.6 K/second:
5000 * 3600 bytes/sec = 18,000,000 bytes/sec = 17.17 megabytes/sec
This is also operating under the fallacy that everyone is on at 28.8 kbps...there will still be some 14.4's...but also lots of 56 kbps...and then lots of people on faster (perhaps from work) links. Heck, I have 1.54 Mbps (T1) in my apartment....just 12 people like me and you're already sucking up more bandwidth than 5000 people @ 28.8...
CJK