Re:Very interesting, but a little late
on
Gzip on a PCI card
·
· Score: 1
I suppose, if you are creating a brand new server farm and you install mod_gzip right from the start, that may not be much trouble. But, if you want to enable compression in an existing server farm, it is probably a lot easier to leave your Web servers alone and just deploy it in your load balancer.
As for the throughput, I agree that a hundred Web servers could outperform one of my cards. But, I'd be happy to sell them more than one card.:-)
The point is that administratively, it is easier to do this where you have concentration of bandwidth (e.g. at the load balancer). In that case, hardware assist is a must.
As for scenarios where this makes sense, if you have other ones, please do post them. I'd be happy to get more marketing material.:-)
Monish Shah Indra Networks http://www.indranetworks.com
Very interesting, but a little late
on
Gzip on a PCI card
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
We at Indra Networks developed a PCI based gzip accelerator a long time ago. It has been on sale for almost a year. The current version of the card is already at 50 MB/s and we have been shipping that since last September. A higher performance version is on the way.
The card is being sold on an OEM basis to manufacturers of load balancers and SSL accelerators. These boxes front-end multiple Web servers and have very high performance requirements. Also, the CPU has plenty of other work to do, for example TCP/IP processing. This is the application that needs hardware acceleration.
For a low performance site, mod_gzip is fine. But, if you have a busy site with hundreds of Web servers, you don't want to go around installing mod_gzip hundreds of times. It is a lot cheaper to buy a load balancer with gzip hardware acceleration.
bzip2 is irrelevant here as IE and Netscape would not understand bzip2 encoding anyway. But they understand gzip just fine (unless you have a version that is many years old).
Monish Shah CTO, Indra Networks www.indranetworks.com
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I suppose, if you are creating a brand new server farm and you install mod_gzip right from the start, that may not be much trouble. But, if you want to enable compression in an existing server farm, it is probably a lot easier to leave your Web servers alone and just deploy it in your load balancer.
:-)
:-)
As for the throughput, I agree that a hundred Web servers could outperform one of my cards. But, I'd be happy to sell them more than one card.
The point is that administratively, it is easier to do this where you have concentration of bandwidth (e.g. at the load balancer). In that case, hardware assist is a must.
As for scenarios where this makes sense, if you have other ones, please do post them. I'd be happy to get more marketing material.
Monish Shah
Indra Networks
http://www.indranetworks.com
We at Indra Networks developed a PCI based gzip accelerator a long time ago. It has been on sale for almost a year. The current version of the card is already at 50 MB/s and we have been shipping that since last September. A higher performance version is on the way.
The card is being sold on an OEM basis to manufacturers of load balancers and SSL accelerators. These boxes front-end multiple Web servers and have very high performance requirements. Also, the CPU has plenty of other work to do, for example TCP/IP processing. This is the application that needs hardware acceleration.
For a low performance site, mod_gzip is fine. But, if you have a busy site with hundreds of Web servers, you don't want to go around installing mod_gzip hundreds of times. It is a lot cheaper to buy a load balancer with gzip hardware acceleration.
bzip2 is irrelevant here as IE and Netscape would not understand bzip2 encoding anyway. But they understand gzip just fine (unless you have a version that is many years old).
Monish Shah
CTO, Indra Networks
www.indranetworks.com