Re: HTTP Mod_Perl mini-server

[Greg Stark <gs...@mit.edu>]

Perrin Harkins <pe...@primenet.com> writes:

> On Fri, 3 Nov 2000, Vivek Khera wrote:
> > Lately I've been getting very interested in using solid-state disks
> > for high-performance issues.  They're expensive, but if you need that
> > much speed, they're worth it.
> 
> Are they?  I tried one once, and it wasn't any faster than my normal disk
> because I had so much RAM it was all getting buffered already.  If you
> don't have enough RAM, it might help, but I suspect these are more
> expensive than equivalent amounts of RAM.

Solid state disks are very effective for particular applications like mail
spools and database logs where the application waits for data to be flushed to
disk before continuing. For most normal applications the same effect can be
obtained by adding RAM and/or playing with tools like memfs. 

-- 
greg

Re: HTTP Mod_Perl mini-server

[sp...@vancouver.yi.org]

On 3 Dec 2000, Greg Stark wrote:

> Perrin Harkins <pe...@primenet.com> writes:
> 
> > On Fri, 3 Nov 2000, Vivek Khera wrote:
> > > Lately I've been getting very interested in using solid-state disks
> > > for high-performance issues.  They're expensive, but if you need that
> > > much speed, they're worth it.
> > 
> > Are they?  I tried one once, and it wasn't any faster than my normal disk
> > because I had so much RAM it was all getting buffered already.  If you
> > don't have enough RAM, it might help, but I suspect these are more
> > expensive than equivalent amounts of RAM.
> Solid state disks are very effective for particular applications like mail
> spools and database logs where the application waits for data to be flushed to
> disk before continuing. For most normal applications the same effect can be
> obtained by adding RAM and/or playing with tools like memfs. 

SCREW solid state disks. Get more ram. Depending on the size of your
website it might be smart to make a ramdisk of a 200MB in size... would be
lightning fast, and apache won't even know about it. For database
application with limited growth and size it might be very good thing to
do, like a dynamic website, from a content database, that is mirrored from
harddrive to the ramdisk on regular basis. Content editing is done
straight to the disk, but lock tables and dump the database, and go on
like a happy camper... =) NO RAID will be faster than RAM, and if it is,
it will cost a price of the new prosche and latency will never be anywhere
near ram... so I'd just give it up right now. Raid is good for large
amounts of data, but if your site is not over 500MB altogther, just get a
linux(or BSD) box fit it with 1G of ram 8G IDE drive and you will be
faster than amazon, provided, that you have enough processing power.

That is all.