This sounds like an edge case to me. Now that it's no longer 1998, most of us don't spec out $500,000 boxes for our stuff anymore. A $5,000 box will get you a long way for just about anything you need to do.
I suspect that the author is looking at a problem that would require tons of hardware regardless of how well it was optimized. Evidence of this can be found in the fact that even after tons of optimization, his $1.5M setup is still running at 20% load steady state.
Our single <$5,000 box handles about 4M pageviews per day without moving the cpu above 5% steady state. That's the sort of baseline I'm used to from the Microsoft stack, so it causes me to question whether the author is really looking at a mainstream case.
> Our single <$5,000 box handles about 4M pageviews per day without moving the cpu above 5% steady state. That's the sort of baseline I'm used to from the Microsoft stack
You realize how meaningless a statement like this is, right? You just can't go around talking about "pageviews" as if they were some uniform measure of workload.
Yeah, I was about to mention that. 4M a day is about 50/sec; if it's nothing but static pages you could serve that on a Pentium 1 without breaking a sweat. I've been giving away P4s recently, so their value is effectively zero - they can probably do it at under 5% too.
The problem is obviously when you're not serving static pages.
Comments
This sounds like an edge case to me. Now that it's no longer 1998, most of us don't spec out $500,000 boxes for our stuff anymore. A $5,000 box will get you a long way for just about anything you need to do.
I suspect that the author is looking at a problem that would require tons of hardware regardless of how well it was optimized. Evidence of this can be found in the fact that even after tons of optimization, his $1.5M setup is still running at 20% load steady state.
Our single <$5,000 box handles about 4M pageviews per day without moving the cpu above 5% steady state. That's the sort of baseline I'm used to from the Microsoft stack, so it causes me to question whether the author is really looking at a mainstream case.
> Our single <$5,000 box handles about 4M pageviews per day without moving the cpu above 5% steady state. That's the sort of baseline I'm used to from the Microsoft stack
You realize how meaningless a statement like this is, right? You just can't go around talking about "pageviews" as if they were some uniform measure of workload.
Yeah, I was about to mention that. 4M a day is about 50/sec; if it's nothing but static pages you could serve that on a Pentium 1 without breaking a sweat. I've been giving away P4s recently, so their value is effectively zero - they can probably do it at under 5% too.
The problem is obviously when you're not serving static pages.