Re: 2.2.18Pre Lan Performance Rocks!

Ingo Molnar
2000-10-30T09:32:09Z

On Mon, 30 Oct 2000, Jeff V. Merkey wrote:

> [...] you've got the web server covered. What about file and print.

a web server, as you probably know, is a read-mostly fileserver that
serves files via the HTTP protocol. The rest is only protocol fluff.

> I think this is great, but most web servers are connected to a T1 or
> T3 line, and all the fancy optimization means absolutely squat since
> about 99.999999% of the planet has a max baandwidth of a T1, ADSL, or
> T3 Line, this is a far cry from Gigabit ethernet, or even 100Mbit
> ethernet.

Your argument is curious - first you cry for performance, then you say
'nobody wants that much bandwidth'. Of course, if the network is bandwidth
limited then we cannot scale above that bandwidth. But thats not the
point. The point is to put 10 cards into a server and still being able to
saturate them. The point is also to spend less cycles on saturating
available bandwidth. The point is also to not flush the L1 just because
someone requested a 10K webpage.

> How many users can you put on the web server? [...]

tens of thousands, on a single CPU. Can probably handle over 100 thousand
users as well, with IP aliasing so the socket space is spread out.

> Web servers are also read only data, the easiest of all LAN cases to
> deal with. It's incoming writes that present all the tough problems,

reads dominate writes in almost all workloads, thats common wisdom. Why
write if nobody reads the data? And while web servers are mostly read only
data, they can write data as well, see POST and PUT. The fact that
incoming writes are hard should not let you distract from the fact that
reads are also extremely important.

Ingo