[geeks] *DROOL*

[David Passmore]

On Tue, Jan 29, 2002 at 06:23:37PM -0500, Dave McGuire wrote:
> 
>   Half a million bucks is cheap?

I wasn't talking about whatever example was given (I only read James'
message, really), I was speaking in the general sense.

When you're building a farm of dozens of E420rs to do front-end MX and POP
service for a system that gets 50 million+ pop transactions a day, it tends
to get a bit expensive. These machines are essentially stateless. They
accept a TCP connection, do a directory lookup, perform some CPU-intensive
operations on the transaction, and then shove data in and out of the network
port. To me, Sun enterprise servers were not designed for stateless,
single-function work. They were designed to do heavily I/O intensive
transactions between memory, disk, and network where there is a lot of
context-switching going on. I would never consider an x86 platform for that
kind of work (what I would term as 'backend' work), just as I would prefer
to use load-balancing and Cheap Boxes for stateless transactions ('frontend'
work).

David