[rescue] SMP on intel wasteful?

[Kurt Huhn]

> You can also think in terms of redundancy..  Corps that run big intel
> farms have huge redundancy systems, ie. you have that 2ghz pent system
> running as a web server but still need 4 of them because 1 can't handle
> the load and then you need backups for hardware crashes, etc...
> Sun systems just run more reliably than that, period.
> Sometimes quality is better than quantity.  At least IMHO.
> 

Case in point, at $former_employer we ran a *pair* of dual 1Ghz Dell
2550s with a gig of RAM for *each* website we had (SuSE Linux).  Why?  A
single box wouldn't stand up to the load.  We had to front them with a
load balancer, and run virtual IPs.  However, when $colo_facility fucked
us over (read archives) I ran the websites on an Ultra-30 400Mhz
(Solaris 8) with 512MB of RAM and had no problems keeping them running,
and running well.

Also, we had an Oracle server that we had trouble running well on a Dell
server as above.  We moved it onto an Ultra-60 1x400Mhz 1 gig of RAM,
and never looked back.  It ran faster, without crashing, and offered
much more functionality (due to Oracle features not available on other
platforms).
-- 
Kurt
kurt at k-huhn.com