OT Linux (RE: [rescue] OT: Stuffed Proliant?)

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Sat, Dec 22, 2001 at 01:09:01AM -0500, Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 22, 2001 at 12:30:27AM -0500, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> > On Sat, Dec 22, 2001 at 12:01:56AM -0500, Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:
> > Yes, but how hard do you really push the K6-2?
> 
>I don't push it at all... my customers who run db-backed web servers do though
> 
> One db query at least for each page load.

Yes, but how many hits per second, how tough of a query per page, how large the
data set, run times involved per hit.

The one thing that intel does have going for it is how cheaply you can bring a 
second machine online (assuming you designed your site correctly).  This can
be used to overcome a lot of short comings.

>>Yes, rotates are good for crypto, as are the 32bit registers.  I wonder how
>>much this really helps people running web servers as opposed to people runing
>>distributed.net.
> 
> How about SSL for an ecommerce site?  Transfer of files over SSH via scp?
> 
> Will know soon enough - SSL cert awaiting delivery.

I don't know.  It would interesting to see for common sites how much of the 
load is the SSL processor versus everything else.  I'm thinking that based
on much CPU power is used on my machines for SSH that it isn't much.  Err, both
SSH and SSL use RSA, do they not.

Besides, lack of rotate isn't all that bad.  Instead of rotating left by 12 
bits, you shift left by 12, shift right by 20, then sum the two shifts.  The
two shifts can be done simultaneously on a super-pipelined processor, so you
need 3 cycles to do a rotate instead of one.  While this seems bad, I find it
hard to believe that this is the sole reason for distributed net to be slower
on SPARCs than intel boxes.  We loose 2 cylces on a rotate.  So what.  We
make it up by doing less loads.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd