Reality was a webserver for about seven and a half years, but before that it was a file/email screw-around server for employees. Started its life as a PowerSeries machine and with lots of duct tape, chewing gum, and bailing wire, eventually received enough upgrades and parts over the years to became basicly a Challenge L.
http://reality.sgi.com still has a few blurbs. The same server should be online again soon as http://reality.exsgi.org.
And really, unless SGI gets off its ass, reality won't be the only webserver at SGI going offline...
Prepare to lose all karma... anyone else find it interesting that the OSes on the top-uptime list are all *BSD and SiliconGraphics IRIX? No Windows here!
Yes, it's true, and it's national. I don't like it, but I'm no longer complaining. Yes, I used to be able to get ~400,000 bytes/sec.. but I can see how selling a $3000/mo connection for $45/mo might be a cause for bankrupcy.
Same thing has happined with the local telco/isp (a rural telco co-op) in my hometown. Because the rather small city has two switchhouses, almost everyone within city limits could get a flavor of 2.1 Mbps SDSL. For $39 per month, no less. The telco tried hard to keep up with the bandwidth usage, but after their second T3 plus an OC3, they gave up and capped thruput to 1 Mbps for everyone on the $39 rate. Static IPs are now an additional $5 per IP and multiple computers per DSL "modem" are no longer supported (but they do continue to work). Still, $44 per month for 1Mbps SDSL with a static IP is a hell of a deal. Yet, folks continue to moan that they're no longer getting the world for $39.
The upload limit has been 12,800 bytes/s for the last year. (I'm using bytes, because nobody seems to understand the diff between KB, Kb, Mbps, MB, etc).
I hear you. Folks around town confuse them as well, and some will even toss MHz into the mix. Yikes!
I noticed someone else asking about VIA KT133 support, so I thought I'd inquire about the KT266A...
We have two new office-brew systems, one mobo from Asus and one from Abit, both are based on the KT266A and neither will boot any flavor of kernel 2.4.x that we've thrown at it. I've done the normal google and usenet searches, but haven't found much other than a few "works for me" posts. Anyone have some pointers or patches?
For me, Macs don't mean gaming, web browsing, or things like that.
The latest "sneakypeaks" of OmniWeb 4 do just fine for me. True, MSIE 5.1 (the Mac OS X version) and OmniWeb feel a bit sluggish compared to MSIE on Mac OS 9 or Windows. Next round will probably be a lot more optimized. I do a lot of Photoshop, but I also develop dynamic web content in perl and php on my box. I also have fully native versions of MS Office, too... Office v.X on the OS X machines and Office 2001 on the OS 9 machines. I don't feel like I'm missing much. I've played a few Mac (and Windows) games. I like my Dreamcast, PS2, and GameCube moreso, though (much like my old Sun days when I used SPARCstation 20 for work and an SNES for play).
I understand your point but I could also compile the latest apache, perl, and php on my Windows machine (or pretty much any machine that I had a c compiler for).
Please excuse my ignorance, for I have not used Windows since NT 4, but does windows have a true multiuser core that allows multiple concurrent shell logins? Because my primary Mac (a dual 800) is the most powerful thing around here, and I have gobs of server daemons and such, there are about 7 people logged in at any given time. This box is my workstation, our web/mail server, and an all-around project box. Usually someone compiling and at least 3 or 4 idling in pine. I almost always have half a dozen terminal windows open when in the middle of a project.
Around here, most of the new Apple users are former SGI-using 3D artists, Amiga holdouts, and even PC users tired of the Microsoft Tax. Let me tell you, when reinstalling Mac OS after overhauling 250 3-year-old Macs with new hard drives and more ram, it's sooo nice to install an OS that doesn't require a CD key.
True, it is proprietary, but with over a million Macs sold each year (in both consumer and pro lines -- not to mention the used market), I don't feel too locked in. It's certainly better than being in a much smaller "traditional" unix market (ie, HP-UX on HP PA-RISC or AIX on IBM RS/6000).
Apple may build the machines, but there are MANY sources for accessories and upgrades. Common IO standards (PCI, AGP, IEEE-1394, USB, HD15 monitor, etc) are great as well.
My only beef is the proprietary connector on the Apple LCD monitors (which, is actually based on a draft of some obscure standard that never took off). But at least DrBotts makes an adapter.
Having been a long time user of MacOS, NeXTstep/OpenStep, and Windows I can honestly say OS X is pretty slick. Each platform has it's ups and downs, even OS X has rough edges. But it's nice to be able to dig down to the core of the beast and do (mostly) what you want. Here is a machine on which I can easily install gcc, compile the latest apache, perl, and php. And yet still run the latest version of MS Office (Office v.X) and Adobe Photoshop. No VMware required.
That said, it's easier to approach the OS from a NeXT mindset, not an Apple mindset. This is not your father's Mac OS. It's a totally new beast. (in a good way)
I've been running that every December since 1994. Don't like the new Sanda art, though. Outta dig out my Sun SPARCstation IPC and see if I still have an ancient vesion of it installed.
I miss it. I had dual 466's @ 550. Then I fried the board and got a PIII 600. Some things were faster but it wasn't as "thick". That's the work I used to describe it.
Speed versus Torque. Like comparing a hot motorcycle to an 18-wheeler. We see the same thing on our Silicon Graphics Octane workstations at work -- some have faster CPUs, some have dual CPUs.
Wow! What does your company do with that beast? What kind of reviews & presentations benefit from that kind of
horsepower? I'm guessing it's not for displaying PowerPoint with 4-foot high bullets.
Engineering reviews of current projects. Tracing beams, pipes, etc on 3D models of offshore oil rigs. When the three InfiniteReality2 pipelines are working together in DPLEX mode we're able to render every pipe, elbow, and setscrew and still fluidly move around the model. It's been a godsend for pouring (or arguing) over details. Standing around a small monitor on an underpowered desktop workstation or, worse yet, blueprints, wastes a tremendous amount of time.
Very well said. However, I did want to make one point.
(you gamers who say you can tell the difference between 100 and 125 FPS are lying... that's 1.5 to 2 times your monitor's refresh rate)
I typically can't stand gamers, but I do understand their desire for framerate. The typical PC game has no mechanism for holding a sustained framerate, nor are things like texture preloading handled with any sort of elegance. Most PC games use weak code and brute force to produce any acceptable output. As such, the machine with the highest average framerate is the machine that's the least likely to get into a situation where the framerate will drop below, say, 30 FPS... perhaps in a complex scene or hitting a spot of particularly bad code.
That said, the nitpicking "this 3D accelerator is better because it's 10.2% faster" blurbs are mostly BS.
Then there's the other end of the spectrum. The company I work for has an SGI-powered RealityCenter for engineering review and presentations. The 30-foot-wide screen is curved and lit by three Barco projectors. It's normally driven as either 3840x1024 super-wide using all three projectors, each driven by a graphics pipe. For more complex scenes, three pipes work in parallel to drive just one projector at 1280x1024. Most of our software is created in house with the help of SGI IRISPerformer and MultiGen-Paradigm Vega libraries. Aside from a few exceptions, the whole setup runs at a locked 60 Hz (60 FPS gfx and projector).
For those that like tech specs, the machine behind the curtain is a Silicon Graphics Onyx2 installed in early 1999. It has 24 MIPS R10000 CPUs each with 8 MB of L2 cache and running at 250 MHz. 48 GB RAM and 1.8 TB of disk via four channels of gigabit fibrechannel. The graphics pipes are three InfiniteReality2 subsystems, each with four Raster Managers (64 MB of dedicated texture ram plus 320 MB of generic graphics ram per pipe). There's a DPLEX module on each pipe to allow all three to work in parallel when needed.
If the bean counters approve, we should have a totally new Onyx3000 system installed by June 2002. After all, our current setup is about 3 years old... ancient by computer terms. Thankfully the projectors, lighting controls, and indeed most of the room (seating, conference table loft, etc) will be reused.
I've been dabbling in 64-bit computing since my business bought me a SiliconGraphics Indigo2 workstation with a MIPS R10000 CPU. Granted the machine could only address 768 MB of RAM (a decent amount for '95... but modern workstations, like the Octane, can address 8 GB or more), but it was quite neat to work with 64-bit pointers, larger datasets, and huge files. For me, the jump to 64-bit computing simply allowed me to work with big numbers without having to revert to tricks and other hacks. For others, it was the introduction of 6 GB datasets in RAM, being able to address each and every element with clean code. These days 64-bit computing is an assumed must on large scale systems (where 64 GB - 1024 GB RAM [on Origin 3000] on a single system [not a cluster] can be considered normal). But on the already-fast, one to two CPU desktop computer, it's not much more than a marketing blurb. And, for most, it's not even too needed, at least until 2+ GB of RAM becomes the norm. 32 bit computing already allows for some pretty darned big pointers and addressing.
Linux is as ready for the enterprise as any other offering (including those already considered to be enterprise platforms). Work with OS/400 or even a commerical Unix for awhile and you'll soon find out that most of Enterpriseness is political. (Some is also legal... if you run into a snafu with kernel 2.6.1, who can you sue??).
Having worked with a large number of platforms, I can confidently say that Linux is up there with the best of them. It's not a leader in all niches (such as home computing or workstation graphics) but it's more than enough for almost all server, developer workstation, and terminal areas. In fact, I will go as far as saying that I would fully trust kernel 2.4.16 + ext3fs for almost any task with in reason.
Linux is at the point where the limiting factor is end user software, not the OS or its libraries. It is time to deploy linux far and wide. Linux will never be the perfect OS... no OS will ever be. It is time to deploy linux.
Apple's OS What about Classic OS 9.2: that has a heart from 1984 Dirk
Heh, this is true. Though it underwent the transformation from 24bit/32bit"dirty" to 32bit "clean" in 1988. Tremendous overhual in 1991 with Blue (System 7). Lots of changes over the years, mostly to threading and VM. Totally new nanokernel in 1999 with Veronica (Mac OS 8.6).
I actually don't mind 9.2.1, it's been tweaked out pretty good for semi-modern hardware. Though many of the changes from 9.1 -> 9.2.1 have broken poorly written drivers. 9.2.2 due within a month is supposed to fix a few remaining issues. Still, nothing beats System 7.1 on my 68040 based Quadra 800. Boot to the desktop in 11 seconds of my 540 MB HD. TCP/IP stack. Support for the onboard ethernet. Still runs Photoshop 2.5.1 fast enough for web-resolution graphics. Zen-like simplicity.
If you haven't noticed by now, Ace's Hardware has a neat little indicator on each page that shows time processing and queue time it spent getting to you (very bottom left-hand corner of each page). Most are about 74ms - 112ms for me. This, plus the result of some pings and traceroutes leads me to belive they're heavily BANDWIDTH bound right now, not CPU bound. I do hope Ace puts up a summary of the Slashdot effect as well as some other data for us to pour over. Some MRTG router graphs of the bandwidth usage would be *really* nice, too.
...well, you won't get drivers for the smart card reader anyway, but that's not the point.
I don't know about Solaris 7, but Solaris 8 comes not only with drivers, but a neat smartcart GUI utility and some good developer libs for doing even more with the interface.
There are more factors than just CPU and Bandwidth... like what's between the two. A new coworker recently told me of his major learning experiences in the mid 1990s running several popular news websites durring the beginning of the web boom. One of the more popular sites he ran originally had a T1 routed through a Cisco 4000 router. Things worked great until he had an additional, load balancing T1 added for added thruput and redundancy. Things didn't feel much faster, in fact, they were almost slower. After much investigation he learned that the router didn't have enough RAM or CPU to handle the packet shuffling that intelligent multihoming routing requires. A similar instance happined with a friend's company when they tried to run a T3 through their existing router. While the old cisco had enough cpu and ram in theory, its switching hardware and thruput couldn't handle the full number of packets the T3 was providing thru the shiny new HSSI high speed serial card.
Now, I realize modern hardware (Cisco 3660 and 7x00 series, and pretty much any Juniper) can route several T3s (at 45mbps each direction) worth of data, but older routers and minimally configed routers do exist.
There are MANY bottlenecks in hosting a website. Server daemon, CPU, router, routing and filtering methods, latency and hops between server and internet backbones, overall bandwidth thruput, and much more.
It's not as simple as "lame server, overloaded CPU, should have installed distro version x+1".
Slashdot Mirror
Reality was a webserver for about seven and a half years, but before that it was a file/email screw-around server for employees. Started its life as a PowerSeries machine and with lots of duct tape, chewing gum, and bailing wire, eventually received enough upgrades and parts over the years to became basicly a Challenge L.
http://reality.sgi.com still has a few blurbs. The same server should be online again soon as http://reality.exsgi.org.
And really, unless SGI gets off its ass, reality won't be the only webserver at SGI going offline...
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html
Prepare to lose all karma... anyone else find it interesting that the OSes on the top-uptime list are all *BSD and SiliconGraphics IRIX? No Windows here!
And the Dell Optiplex is pretty????
Yes, it's true, and it's national. I don't like it, but I'm no longer complaining. Yes, I used to be able to get ~400,000 bytes/sec.. but I can see how selling a $3000/mo connection for $45/mo might be a cause for bankrupcy.
Same thing has happined with the local telco/isp (a rural telco co-op) in my hometown. Because the rather small city has two switchhouses, almost everyone within city limits could get a flavor of 2.1 Mbps SDSL. For $39 per month, no less. The telco tried hard to keep up with the bandwidth usage, but after their second T3 plus an OC3, they gave up and capped thruput to 1 Mbps for everyone on the $39 rate. Static IPs are now an additional $5 per IP and multiple computers per DSL "modem" are no longer supported (but they do continue to work). Still, $44 per month for 1Mbps SDSL with a static IP is a hell of a deal. Yet, folks continue to moan that they're no longer getting the world for $39.
The upload limit has been 12,800 bytes/s for the last year. (I'm using bytes, because nobody seems to understand the diff between KB, Kb, Mbps, MB, etc).
I hear you. Folks around town confuse them as well, and some will even toss MHz into the mix. Yikes!
I noticed someone else asking about VIA KT133 support, so I thought I'd inquire about the KT266A...
We have two new office-brew systems, one mobo from Asus and one from Abit, both are based on the KT266A and neither will boot any flavor of kernel 2.4.x that we've thrown at it. I've done the normal google and usenet searches, but haven't found much other than a few "works for me" posts. Anyone have some pointers or patches?
What does any of that have to do with compiling apache, perl and php?
I was just pointing out how OS X is more "unixey". But, you win -- Windows rocks, MacOS sucks. End of thead. NO CARRIER
For me, Macs don't mean gaming, web browsing, or things like that.
The latest "sneakypeaks" of OmniWeb 4 do just fine for me. True, MSIE 5.1 (the Mac OS X version) and OmniWeb feel a bit sluggish compared to MSIE on Mac OS 9 or Windows. Next round will probably be a lot more optimized. I do a lot of Photoshop, but I also develop dynamic web content in perl and php on my box. I also have fully native versions of MS Office, too... Office v.X on the OS X machines and Office 2001 on the OS 9 machines. I don't feel like I'm missing much. I've played a few Mac (and Windows) games. I like my Dreamcast, PS2, and GameCube moreso, though (much like my old Sun days when I used SPARCstation 20 for work and an SNES for play).
I understand your point but I could also compile the latest apache, perl, and php on my Windows machine (or pretty much any machine that I had a c compiler for).
Please excuse my ignorance, for I have not used Windows since NT 4, but does windows have a true multiuser core that allows multiple concurrent shell logins? Because my primary Mac (a dual 800) is the most powerful thing around here, and I have gobs of server daemons and such, there are about 7 people logged in at any given time. This box is my workstation, our web/mail server, and an all-around project box. Usually someone compiling and at least 3 or 4 idling in pine. I almost always have half a dozen terminal windows open when in the middle of a project.
Around here, most of the new Apple users are former SGI-using 3D artists, Amiga holdouts, and even PC users tired of the Microsoft Tax. Let me tell you, when reinstalling Mac OS after overhauling 250 3-year-old Macs with new hard drives and more ram, it's sooo nice to install an OS that doesn't require a CD key.
True, it is proprietary, but with over a million Macs sold each year (in both consumer and pro lines -- not to mention the used market), I don't feel too locked in. It's certainly better than being in a much smaller "traditional" unix market (ie, HP-UX on HP PA-RISC or AIX on IBM RS/6000).
Apple may build the machines, but there are MANY sources for accessories and upgrades. Common IO standards (PCI, AGP, IEEE-1394, USB, HD15 monitor, etc) are great as well.
My only beef is the proprietary connector on the Apple LCD monitors (which, is actually based on a draft of some obscure standard that never took off). But at least DrBotts makes an adapter.
Having been a long time user of MacOS, NeXTstep/OpenStep, and Windows I can honestly say OS X is pretty slick. Each platform has it's ups and downs, even OS X has rough edges. But it's nice to be able to dig down to the core of the beast and do (mostly) what you want. Here is a machine on which I can easily install gcc, compile the latest apache, perl, and php. And yet still run the latest version of MS Office (Office v.X) and Adobe Photoshop. No VMware required.
That said, it's easier to approach the OS from a NeXT mindset, not an Apple mindset. This is not your father's Mac OS. It's a totally new beast. (in a good way)
But where is the monitor displaying xsnow?
I've been running that every December since 1994. Don't like the new Sanda art, though. Outta dig out my Sun SPARCstation IPC and see if I still have an ancient vesion of it installed.
xsnow!
I've been running xsnow between Dec 1 and Jan 1 since about 1994. It's about the only true tradition I have.
... Mac OS X and OmniWeb, that is. OW 4.1 will be out in about a week with gobs of speed and bug fixes.
I miss it. I had dual 466's @ 550. Then I fried the board and got a PIII 600. Some things were faster but it wasn't as "thick". That's the work I used to describe it.
Speed versus Torque. Like comparing a hot motorcycle to an 18-wheeler. We see the same thing on our Silicon Graphics Octane workstations at work -- some have faster CPUs, some have dual CPUs.
I'm pretty certain Halo (developed by Bungie) was originally going to be a Mac game with ports to Windows and maybe a game console (PS2?).
Wow! What does your company do with that beast? What kind of reviews & presentations benefit from that kind of horsepower? I'm guessing it's not for displaying PowerPoint with 4-foot high bullets.
Engineering reviews of current projects. Tracing beams, pipes, etc on 3D models of offshore oil rigs. When the three InfiniteReality2 pipelines are working together in DPLEX mode we're able to render every pipe, elbow, and setscrew and still fluidly move around the model. It's been a godsend for pouring (or arguing) over details. Standing around a small monitor on an underpowered desktop workstation or, worse yet, blueprints, wastes a tremendous amount of time.
Very well said. However, I did want to make one point.
(you gamers who say you can tell the difference between 100 and 125 FPS are lying... that's 1.5 to 2 times your monitor's refresh rate)
I typically can't stand gamers, but I do understand their desire for framerate. The typical PC game has no mechanism for holding a sustained framerate, nor are things like texture preloading handled with any sort of elegance. Most PC games use weak code and brute force to produce any acceptable output. As such, the machine with the highest average framerate is the machine that's the least likely to get into a situation where the framerate will drop below, say, 30 FPS... perhaps in a complex scene or hitting a spot of particularly bad code.
That said, the nitpicking "this 3D accelerator is better because it's 10.2% faster" blurbs are mostly BS.
Then there's the other end of the spectrum. The company I work for has an SGI-powered RealityCenter for engineering review and presentations. The 30-foot-wide screen is curved and lit by three Barco projectors. It's normally driven as either 3840x1024 super-wide using all three projectors, each driven by a graphics pipe. For more complex scenes, three pipes work in parallel to drive just one projector at 1280x1024. Most of our software is created in house with the help of SGI IRISPerformer and MultiGen-Paradigm Vega libraries. Aside from a few exceptions, the whole setup runs at a locked 60 Hz (60 FPS gfx and projector).
For those that like tech specs, the machine behind the curtain is a Silicon Graphics Onyx2 installed in early 1999. It has 24 MIPS R10000 CPUs each with 8 MB of L2 cache and running at 250 MHz. 48 GB RAM and 1.8 TB of disk via four channels of gigabit fibrechannel. The graphics pipes are three InfiniteReality2 subsystems, each with four Raster Managers (64 MB of dedicated texture ram plus 320 MB of generic graphics ram per pipe). There's a DPLEX module on each pipe to allow all three to work in parallel when needed.
If the bean counters approve, we should have a totally new Onyx3000 system installed by June 2002. After all, our current setup is about 3 years old... ancient by computer terms. Thankfully the projectors, lighting controls, and indeed most of the room (seating, conference table loft, etc) will be reused.
I've been dabbling in 64-bit computing since my business bought me a SiliconGraphics Indigo2 workstation with a MIPS R10000 CPU. Granted the machine could only address 768 MB of RAM (a decent amount for '95... but modern workstations, like the Octane, can address 8 GB or more), but it was quite neat to work with 64-bit pointers, larger datasets, and huge files. For me, the jump to 64-bit computing simply allowed me to work with big numbers without having to revert to tricks and other hacks. For others, it was the introduction of 6 GB datasets in RAM, being able to address each and every element with clean code. These days 64-bit computing is an assumed must on large scale systems (where 64 GB - 1024 GB RAM [on Origin 3000] on a single system [not a cluster] can be considered normal). But on the already-fast, one to two CPU desktop computer, it's not much more than a marketing blurb. And, for most, it's not even too needed, at least until 2+ GB of RAM becomes the norm. 32 bit computing already allows for some pretty darned big pointers and addressing.
The CRT produces 99% of the iMac's heat. Now, that should change whenever Apple switches to TFT LCD displays for iMac.
Linux is as ready for the enterprise as any other offering (including those already considered to be enterprise platforms). Work with OS/400 or even a commerical Unix for awhile and you'll soon find out that most of Enterpriseness is political. (Some is also legal... if you run into a snafu with kernel 2.6.1, who can you sue??).
Having worked with a large number of platforms, I can confidently say that Linux is up there with the best of them. It's not a leader in all niches (such as home computing or workstation graphics) but it's more than enough for almost all server, developer workstation, and terminal areas. In fact, I will go as far as saying that I would fully trust kernel 2.4.16 + ext3fs for almost any task with in reason.
Linux is at the point where the limiting factor is end user software, not the OS or its libraries. It is time to deploy linux far and wide. Linux will never be the perfect OS... no OS will ever be. It is time to deploy linux.
Apple's OS
What about Classic OS 9.2: that has a heart from 1984 Dirk
Heh, this is true. Though it underwent the transformation from 24bit/32bit"dirty" to 32bit "clean" in 1988. Tremendous overhual in 1991 with Blue (System 7). Lots of changes over the years, mostly to threading and VM. Totally new nanokernel in 1999 with Veronica (Mac OS 8.6).
I actually don't mind 9.2.1, it's been tweaked out pretty good for semi-modern hardware. Though many of the changes from 9.1 -> 9.2.1 have broken poorly written drivers. 9.2.2 due within a month is supposed to fix a few remaining issues. Still, nothing beats System 7.1 on my 68040 based Quadra 800. Boot to the desktop in 11 seconds of my 540 MB HD. TCP/IP stack. Support for the onboard ethernet. Still runs Photoshop 2.5.1 fast enough for web-resolution graphics. Zen-like simplicity.
But I digress...
If you haven't noticed by now, Ace's Hardware has a neat little indicator on each page that shows time processing and queue time it spent getting to you (very bottom left-hand corner of each page). Most are about 74ms - 112ms for me. This, plus the result of some pings and traceroutes leads me to belive they're heavily BANDWIDTH bound right now, not CPU bound. I do hope Ace puts up a summary of the Slashdot effect as well as some other data for us to pour over. Some MRTG router graphs of the bandwidth usage would be *really* nice, too.
...well, you won't get drivers for the smart card reader anyway, but that's not the point.
I don't know about Solaris 7, but Solaris 8 comes not only with drivers, but a neat smartcart GUI utility and some good developer libs for doing even more with the interface.
There are more factors than just CPU and Bandwidth... like what's between the two. A new coworker recently told me of his major learning experiences in the mid 1990s running several popular news websites durring the beginning of the web boom. One of the more popular sites he ran originally had a T1 routed through a Cisco 4000 router. Things worked great until he had an additional, load balancing T1 added for added thruput and redundancy. Things didn't feel much faster, in fact, they were almost slower. After much investigation he learned that the router didn't have enough RAM or CPU to handle the packet shuffling that intelligent multihoming routing requires. A similar instance happined with a friend's company when they tried to run a T3 through their existing router. While the old cisco had enough cpu and ram in theory, its switching hardware and thruput couldn't handle the full number of packets the T3 was providing thru the shiny new HSSI high speed serial card.
Now, I realize modern hardware (Cisco 3660 and 7x00 series, and pretty much any Juniper) can route several T3s (at 45mbps each direction) worth of data, but older routers and minimally configed routers do exist.
There are MANY bottlenecks in hosting a website. Server daemon, CPU, router, routing and filtering methods, latency and hops between server and internet backbones, overall bandwidth thruput, and much more.
It's not as simple as "lame server, overloaded CPU, should have installed distro version x+1".