27 Sep
2012
27 Sep
'12
3:16 p.m.
Eh while overkill it would make a nice vm host. Otherwise I suppose it could be either not
recommended but doing all the server tasks for their infrastructure (db server, web
server, ftp, dhcp. Dns. Email, whatever ad/ldap). But still overkill. Vm wise they could
host many customers that way.
Now if they *really* want to get the darwin award they could get that, then do a raid 0
:-)
-----Original Message-----
From: Mouse <mouse at rodents-montreal.org>
Sender: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.orgDate: Thu, 27 Sep 2012 15:54:12
To: <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Reply-To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Subject: Re: strange remark about your collection?
Probably not, at least not if they're smart.
There's no way that
system could keep up with even a very modest consumer GPU for
bitcoin mining, [...] 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.
> 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...
Do they plan on using that system for [other things]?
My money would be on bitcoin
"mining"...[...] A Socket 7 based machine such as a 200MHz Pentium
P54CS with 128MB of
ram can even handle serving out 1k hits a day of static
content...while running modern software (BSD or Linux and Apache).
I'm not sure I'd try it today with a 486 based system due to latency
and the bandwidth limitations of the ISA bus (10Mb network cards),
Huh? 1K hits a day is less than one a minute. Unless the files it's
serving are truly ginormous, network bandwidth is not an issue; I'd
expect a 486-based system to be just fine. (Of course, that "less than
one a minute" is average; if traffic isn't approximately flat, it could
actually need to serve four or five pages a minute during peak periods.
I still have trouble seeing a 486 as insufficient.) The major reason
_I_ see for using something beefier is ease of obtaining it. Octo-core
Xeons with multiple gigs of RAM are trivial to order. 486s aren't,
especially if you want a 1U or 2U rackmount machine 'cause that's what
fits in your co-lo space.
Latency, mayyyybe, if there's an expectation that the whole page be
served with sub-second delay or some such silliness.
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