[SunRescue] Off Topic: Rescuing my Sun

[Dave McGuire]

On May 21, James Lockwood wrote:
> >   I've said it before, and I'll say it again.  Never understimate a
> > Sparc2.  Unless you've got a clearchannel DS3 to your facility, the
> > bottleneck will always be the connectivity.
> 
> ...unless you're doing any kind of local processing.  If you're serving
> purely static data, even a Sun 3 will saturate a T1.
> 
> It's easily possible to need 40+ fast CPU's with over 40GB of RAM to
> saturate a T1 with requests coming in against a terabyte+ database.  It
> all depends on what you're doing.  Free text searching and image based
> query by example are extremely resource intensive, web serving static
> content is not.

  Of course you're right, James...My comment was a purely knee-jerk
reaction because lately I've been surrounded by people who insist that
they NEEEEEEED a 1.4GHz processor to serve their six-page [completely
static] web site on their 768kbit DSL circuit.

  From my perspective of late, those people drastically outnumber the
folks who are doing any *work* to generate the data that they spew
across the network.

              -Dave McGuire