*BSD News Article 79036


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From: shankar@chromatic.com (Shankar Unni)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.infosystems.www.misc
Subject: Re: Unix too slow for a Web server?
Followup-To: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.infosystems.www.misc
Date: 24 Sep 1996 17:06:51 GMT
Organization: Chromatic Research, Sunnyvale, CA
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Steve Dunham (dunham@gdl.msu.edu) wrote:

> "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org> writes:
> > *grin*.  I think you really need to talk to BEST Internet, over at
> > http://www.best.net - they might even have a few Challenge machines to
> > sell at reasonable prices, having already tried this! :)
> 
> FWIW, I mentioned the Best case to a friend who uses these machines,
> his response:
> [...]
> Looks like they bought the wrong machine for the job.

There was more to it than that. Best wanted to use the large servers both
as computational and disk servers and web servers. They had problems on two
different fronts: the fact that minor hardware errors caused the system to
panic (it's an XFS thing, to preserve the filesystem as much as possible),
and system crashes related to heavy network usage on SMP machines.

Both have been addressed in a series of patches, but the point that Steve
makes is correct: get the right machine for the job. 

-- 
Shankar Unni                                  shankar@chromatic.com
Chromatic Research                            (408) 752-9488