29 Sep
2012
29 Sep
'12
10:23 a.m.
On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 06:10:14PM -0500, Tothwolf wrote:
I've got machines with 256 MB of RAM running current Debian Linux just
fine. And yes, one of them is actually running BIND. For rather small
zones, admittedly.
On Thu, 27 Sep 2012, Mouse wrote:
It wouldn't be the first, second, third, or even tenth time I've
seen someone spec a machine much larger than required so that they
could use it for their own purposes.
Oh yes ..
>>>>Serves almost exclusively static pages, max 1k hits per
>>>>day. They are looking at moving to a rackmount system.
>>>>What does he spec? Eight core Xeon with 96 gigs of
>>>>RAM...
There is just no way someone is going to spec a
machine that
large for such a small task without some other background
motive.
I disagree. There are a whole lot of sysadmins who do not really
understand such things; I'm sure lots of them would go "oh, I want
a webserver, let's look up some recommended specs for webservers"
and find a spec list by someone who's doing all sorts of
server-side computation (which, to be fair, is what a lot of
people think of "a webserver" as doing). Or they ask a friend who
doesn't know the load in question and answers hurriedly. Or, with
slightly more competence, they find a wide spectrum of answers and
figure they don't know what's actually needed and err on the side
of extra power. Machines that large are not exactly commodity items,
even today.
Machines of that size are easily aquired today from your hardware vendor
of choice.
Latency,
mayyyybe, if there's an expectation that the whole page
be served with sub-second delay or some such silliness.
Even a one second delay while serving static content -is- a problem.
Each such delay adds to the total page load time, and it adds up in
a hurry.
A modern Linux or BSD distribution typically expects gobs of memory
(1GB+) but I've found most will run well with 128MB so long as swap
is available (and you aren't running BIND). As much as I actually
like the i486 arch (power efficiency, among other things), a 486
based system will simply not have enough physical memory available
(generally no more than 32MB) and it would craw to a halt with a
modern OS while trying to swap stuff out to disc while serving up
pages via Apache.
It doesn't have to be apache, even though that is kind of the default.
For instance lighttpd works just fine if all you want is to serve a bunch
of static pages and don't need any fancy tricks (like URL rewriting ...).
Kind regards,
Alex.
--
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison