[rescue] Total corporate madness (

[Lionel Peterson]

--- Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez <lefa at ucsc.edu> wrote:
> On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, Lionel Peterson wrote:
> > --- Frank Van Damme <frank.vandamme at student.kuleuven.ac.be> wrote:
> > > btw, isn't 4 cpu's overkill for a file server?
> >
> > Overkill?
> >
> > It seems to me you would want, at minimum, one CPU for every
> > network connection the machine has...
> 
> Why on earth would you want that?

Well, speaking from ignorance, and grossly simplifying (cause that the
level of understanding I have on these topics), it seems to me that
since:

 a) A CPU can only do one thing at a time

 b) Only one packet can be on a network segment at one time

It follows that if I had two nics on a single CPU system, and if there
were file requests coming in on each nic, one would wait for the
previous one to complete.

If each nic had it's own CPU, then requests that come in can be
dispatched handily. Oh, and to follow my simplification, you would want
lots of drives on lots of controllers, and each drive would have unique
files that would seldom/never be needed at the same time (spread the
load across drive spindles/controllers)...

Remember, here on this list, excess is assumed ;^)



=====
Lionel

"I am not into examining other peoples' dumps..." - Sheldon T. Hall

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