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wcarchive Upgraded 193

Posted by justin++ from the new-userlimit,-too dept.
aqua writes "Just noticed that ftp.cdrom.com, renowned for being the single biggest/fastest FTP server in history, yesterday quietly received its first hardware upgrade in two years -- the old machine was a single PPro200 / 2GB RAM; it's now a Xeon500 / 4GB. Software and disk stayed the same. Nice to see such a venerated old server get some more ponies under its hood. For the first time it also includes a credit for where they buy their hardware. The message is here. " The good news is that the max. user limit is 5000 now - I hope they have the bandwidth for it. And phil thinks he sends out a lot of data.
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wcarchive Upgraded More

wcarchive Upgraded

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  • ha, ha! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    That's a good one.

  • Old Man... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Ok, now I feel old, I paid $3000 for a new P90 with 16MB RAM, and logged onto CDROM.COM and it had a P100-120 w/512 MB RAM, Wow... Who needed that much memory??? And the max login was about 100 users, and that was never ever met, because everyone was still on BBS's. (My 25th birthday is this weekend, so really, I'm not THAT old...)

  • Financial Problems (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    According to employees of Walnut Creek CDROM, the CDROM market is down and Walnut Creek may not be with us much longer. One major chain of computer superstores recently discontinued offering Walnut Creek products. But it is not surprising because Walnut Creek Products are overpriced. Couple that with the looting of Slackware Linux profits to subsidize FreeBSD (which has never made a profit for Walnut Creek) and you have a recipe for bad blood and bad customer relations. If I were a Linux user, I would be outraged.

    Thank goodness there is an alternative. I've had nothing but the best service and the best values from Cheapbytes. [cheapbytes.com] There you can find everything from Linux to FreeBSD at bargain prices with top notch service. I will never again waste a nickel on Walnut Creek ripoffs.

  • Let me put it this way (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If their site maintainer redirected a significant fraction of their traffic to slashdot.org, slashdot's servers would melt into a puddle of metal.

    The "slashdot effect" is only impressive because there's never been anything like it before - but in terms of traffic, the slashdot effect is pretty minor compared to what cdrom.com sees.

    In short, no.

  • Re:Let me put it this way 20 TB/month (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Excerpt from ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/archive-info/wcarchive.txt

    Each month, more than 6 million people visit wcarchive - sending out to them
    more than 20 terabytes of files (as of November, 1998), with the only limit being
    the Internet backbone(s).

  • Re:He is talking about memory! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    the 2GB limit is not arbitrary; it is due to the design of the present Linux VM code. Basically, the existing VM code tries to avoid MMU reconfigurations when doing I/O by leaving the entire machine's physical ram mapped into every process's address space. Therefore, the amount of virtual memory (i.e. memory that can actually be used by a user process) is reduced from 4GB by the size of the physical RAM.
    A 2GB/2GB split is at present the most reasonable configuration for a "large memory" Intel Linux machine.

    FreeBSD, on the other hand, requires the occasional (or not so occasional) MMU reconfiguration from within a system call when the memory it needs to do I/O with is not accessable.
    MMU reconfigurations can be very expensive. However, this also makes it possible to use up to 4GB of memory on a 32-bit machine.

    It would be interesting to see which approach is really more efficient, having not seen any benchmarks I couldn't say.
    However, it seems that in the future Linux will do some VM operations the FreeBSD way (this will be necessary to support >4GB with the PPro/Xeon, as you then literally can't map all of physical RAM into a 4GB address space!)


    By the way, you can't exceed 2GB RAM on a 64-bit Linux machine either-- unfortunately, these machines are presently tied to _32-bit_ PCI busses, and the kernel doesn't yet do the icky translation necessary to get around this.
    (this wouldn't be a problem if you had exclusively 64-bit PCI devices, but no such machines currently exist)

  • Re:YES! "provided by" = free (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ....but what techie would take a store bought over getting to build their own?....

    Any techie that manages over a handful of servers! My time is worth too much.

  • Can Linux use 4GB? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Linux (as far as I know) can't handle more
    than 2GB (or is it 1GB?). That's a shame because
    FreeBSD evidently can use 4GB (2^32). When
    Linus is asked about this memory limitation
    of Linux, he typically answers: "Use a 64-bit
    processor". IMHO, that's not a good answer.
    32-bit architecture is not dead yet. Linus
    should consider this limitation as a serious
    deficiency of Linux and work on fixing it
    rather than saying "Use Alpha". In fact Xeon
    memory address bus is probably higher than
    32-bit and so a OS running on Xeon should be
    able to handle higher than 4GB RAM.

  • Bandwidth not a problem. (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Some friends of mine are network engineers at the facility where wcarchive colocates. It has full-duplex 100MB Fast Ethernet, direct to a backbone router that peers with just about every major network in the same room. Nice. Count me in.
  • Seems a few people are confused here...

    Linux on 32bit based systems can handle 2gig files at max (not filesystems!; they can be *much* larger). The reason linux does not wish to up the file size and and ram support is that it would take some non-pretty hacking.

    Now, don't think x86 is the only 32bit arch out there, Sparcs are 32bit as well, and these systems will be around for some time, with boxes such as SS10 and 20's which can keep chugging along even under huge loads.
  • 5000 users? They've been running with that many connections for a _long_ time..
  • Regardless of my route to it, wcarchive has always been terribly slow. My brother once compared it to a roomful of people whistling into 300 baud modems. Now that they're allowing 5,000 users, I only expect download speeds to suffer even more.

    Hopefully, they'll get a fatter pipe soon too. (It will be very difficult to convince me that what they have now is adequate, based on previous experiences.)

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad

  • My school has a fractional T3 to BBN in Cambridge. I generally get anywhere from 200 to 600K/second from fast sites. Here's what I get from cdrom.com, at 6 AM in the morning no less:

    150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for 'linux-2.2.6.tar.gz' (13588897 bytes).
    226 Transfer complete.
    13588897 bytes received in 607 secs (22 kbytes/sec)

    Good thing there are wcarchive mirrors...

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad

  • 100mbit connection..
    divided by 5000 users..
    = 20000 BITS per second per person.

    Not accounting for any overhead at all and assuming 8 bits per byte (much to the dismay of old PDP-8 users I imagine), that's 2.5kbytes/s available, on average, per user.

    Anyone getting more than that is incredibly lucky (and is probably slowing the rest of the users down).

    - A.P.

    --


    "One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad

  • Most Micron components are off the shelf items. Micron memory is some of the best. They use Micronics motherboards which I think are home grown models.
  • If it was not a donation I wonder if they had to pay the microsoft tax?

  • I've seen it maxed out a few times (at 3600 users). Don't know if that qualilies as having been slashdotted. Perhaps someone with a similar hardware/software/connection setup would allow a test?

  • Posted by Fleeno:

    Is it Slashdotted already?
  • Posted by Justin:

    i thought it was 3000?
    anyone confirm either way?
  • No it wouldn't. You have access to this part of the address space only when you're in ring 0, i.e. when in kernel code.

    OG.
  • Habit, I think, is the real reason. When cdrom was first up, there was no real competition. FreeBSD was infinitely better than Linux for servers. Nowadays, with linux 2.2, it's not that clear. But for now freebsd is more than good enough, and changing would surely cost them a lot without winning much if anything.

    Anyone has serious benchmarks comparing the latest freebsd and linux kernels ? I think it would be interesting if done seriously, especially in the networking area.

    OG.
  • Looks like no one's bitten yet.
  • Started with an Apple ][+ with 48k, then an IBM PC (Yes, the original). Then a Zenith laptop with a 20 MB hard drive (Whoopee!) then a AMD 386 DX-40, 486 DX2-66, Pentium 120, and now a AMD K6 300. I think I still liked the Apple the best tho ;) Oh, yeah, I also had an Atari "VCS". That's what they called it before they renamed it to the "2600". It even had a "BASIC" cartridge that let you write programs. Couldn't save them though!
  • FreeBSD, of course!
  • "Why should a computer company donate hardware to another for-profit business for free?"

    Uh, haven't you seen adds on other commercial internet things, like WEBSITES? CDROM.COM doesn't sell hardware, so just like other websites do, they can make a buisness decision and accept a hardware add on thier site, the and thier ftp site is obviously a high traffic site. That's why.

  • But you can't make an Intel linux box with more than 2GB of RAM (and even that requires patches).
  • That's where Micron and Dell differ :)
  • The only issue is, that even though you know that these pieces of hardware WORK, you don't know they work together. And yes, when you buy a preassembled PC from a good manufacturer, you DO know exactly what you get.

    And warranties are better for a LOT more than just not wanting to open the machine up. I've had many a time where some WEIRD problems showed up and nothing I tried work, but calling tech support fixed it in about 10 minutes. A large computer manufacturer has simply seen it all and can help you with almost anything.
  • WCarchive is the busiest *public* FTP archive in the world. Who knows what kind of private sites exist out there. Also, there are quite likely *larger* archives out there, though they don't push as much traffic as WC.

    I remember when WC took this title away from MS a while ago. The former record had been made by a sizable cluster of machines, all of which ran on faster hardware than cdrom.com . A shining day for open source.

    To me, the single greatest argument for using FreeBSD is that WCarchive uses it.

    --Lenny

    //"You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN.
    It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar."
  • I remember about four years ago when I was hell-bent on downloading every Doom WAD I could get my grubby little hands on, ftp.cdrom.com seemed to be just a run-of-the-mill server. It was in its infancy -- maximum anonymous users was a measly 240!!

    I'm tellin' ya, this makes me feel OLD!
  • FreeBSD. FreeBSD [freebsd.org]
    Oh, and for the uneducated...
    FreeBSD != a linux distribution.

    -luqin

    ---
  • As I recall, the 36-bit extention to the Pentium Pro/II/III is an ugly hack.

    Perhaps uglier than, say, what the SPARC Reference MMU did on boring old 32-bit SPARC V7 and SPARC V8 processors to let you get 36-bit physical addresses, as the P6 trick requires 64-bit page directory and page table entries, while the SRMMU did it with 32-bit PTEs, but that might be a result of all the historical baggage Intel has to carry around.

    I think only a special version of Wint can use it.

    Given that the person to whom you're replying said

    Sun has done it already with Solaris 7 3/99 release:

    The Physical Address Extension (PAE) is a new feature of the Intel platform edition of the 3/99 update that provides greater scalability and higher performance for Intel Pentium Pro systems. It allows you to address up to 32 Gbytes of physical memory on a Pentium Pro system...

    I'm not sure why you think that.

  • The two gig limit is a x86 limit; try putting more then two gigs on a non-xenon system.

    I may be misremembering, but I think Sequent had systems with 4GB per NUMA-Q node (and, I suspect, probably allowed each node to access memory in the other nodes) before Xeon Warrior Princess was out.

    Xenon's have a hack to see more then two gigs

    The MMU trick to handle more than 4GB (not 2GB) of main memory dates back to the Pentium Pro; it wasn't introduced in the Xeons. The support chips for Xeon may have introduced features to handle more than 4GB of physical memory, but that's a different issue (and folks such as Sequent may well have rolled their own support chips).

  • I almost hate to follow up to this thread since it's been primarily characterized by various people slamming Linux or FreeBSD and I personally hate that (I may be a FreeBSD guy, but I've always enjoyed interacting with you Linux folks), but perhaps I can at least contribute a little light instead of heat to this discussion:

    First off, the machine from Micron was indeed donated to us in exchange for the advertising blurb you see on login and it's a very nice box even though we didn't build it ourselves. We did hand-build the previous box and it also worked just great, the lesson here being that you *can* have a decent system both ways if you're simply careful and well-informed about what you select. The rack case the Micron uses is also very nice and I think we'd have been hard-pressed to put something together which matched this system feature for feature given that some of the components simply aren't available seperately (and even if they were, we do have better things to do than conduct exhaustive hardware searches for each and every piece). Some homebrew box also wouldn't have been donated by a major manufacturer, of course, saving us tens of thousands of dollars and a lot of time, so chew on that for awhile. :-)

    Second, it's basically unknown whether or not Linux would be capable of doing the same job in this role since it's simply not been tried, at least not by us. In order to prove it either way, you'd need to create an equivalent site to ftp.cdrom.com and also colocate it at a major backbone where it could pump out 100mbits/sec on a more or less continuous basis (a 1GB upgrade is also planned and awaiting the arrival of more switch hardware).

    It's also fair to say that FreeBSD didn't necessarily excel at this task at the very beginning (some 5 years ago) and it was directly through the experience gained with ftp.cdrom.com that we were able to improve FreeBSD to the point where it was able to handle these kinds of loads. I'm sure that if Linux were provided with a similar real-world test bed, it would be similarly improved if and as necessary and I can only suggest that those folks wishing to provide themselves with this kind of Linux showcase machine should go ahead and build one; I'd personally be very interested in seeing the results of such an effort.

    We currently pump out more than 800GB per day and I can assure you that this number will only (significantly) increase once we upgrade the bandwidth to 1 gigabit. As you can see by looking at:

    http://www.emsphone.com/stats/cdrom.html

    We're basically now maxing out the 100Mbit interface with a 5000 user limit (the major dips you see in this graph were the periods when the box was down for major hardware upgrades, e.g. the 1/2 terabyte RAID array and then the Micron upgrade). The box, in both of its incarnations, has very stable but we've yet to master the in-place hardware upgrade. :-)

    It's also probably a little-known fact that we pump out at least 10X the number of Red Hat releases that ftp.redhat.com does, so some of the Linux folks throwing stones here should perhaps pause in mid-throw and consider the service this machine provides to both the FreeBSD AND the Linux communities. :) Not only Red Hat, but Slackware and Debian are available from this box and are both very popular downloads. Once we upgrade our bandwidth and can up the user limit to 10,000 users, I can also forsee the very idea of "user limits" becoming virtually non-applicable to visitors at ftp.cdrom.com and that's a good thing indeed for anyone who's ever been frustrated at being turned away from some popular collection of bits because the site in question has been "slashdotted" by thousands of other eager downloaders.

    ftp.cdrom.com has long been a mecca for people interested in shareware/freeware of all sorts and we aim to keep it that way well into the future. It's not hyperbole when we say it's the biggest, fastest general public FTP archive in the world and we're always interested in new material (M$ might run bigger server farms, but that they cannot say) so please contact us if you have any suggestions for material we should offer there - ftp@ftp.cdrom.com is our "suggestion box" address.

    Other URLs of interest:

    ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/archive-info/wcarchive.jpg
    ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/config.txt

    - Jordan
  • Well, in my day, we didn't have x86, we 'ad Hovis, and granddad always did say it were a bloody long way to go for 256k bits of RAM
  • WCarchive is the busiest *public* FTP archive in the world. Who knows what kind of private sites exist out there.

    How many private sites could have enough traffic to regularly max out 3600 users? Even for a heavily used server, that takes at least 36,000 people using it. Only a large company or small government serving everything off one server could reach that.
  • The two gig limit is a x86 limit; try putting more then two gigs on a non-xenon system.

    Xenon's have a hack to see more then two gigs, and if you take the word of the Linux kernel hackers it's a very ugly hack.

    If you want more then two gigs in linux get a Alpha, it's already 64 bit. On the HIGHER end motherboards Alpha has a much better memory subsystem.

    I am not a Alpha bigot, I just play one on slashdot. :)


  • You can, but it costs too much compared to the
    current set up. I think I heard that previous
    machines were donated (I have not heard about
    the current).

    Sometimes you have to work with what you have,
    and usually FreeBSD can kick penguin ass if
    "what you have" has to do a lot.
  • It is a reference to the "Slashdot Effect". When
    a site is referenced on Slashdot, so many readers
    go to the site that it crashes or is otherwise
    unresponsive. Only seems to happen to servers
    running Linux.
  • Actually, I think this is the only one where
    I lied through my teeth. Let me reread my other
    responses to be sure.
  • Saturday, May 1st, 1999 1:20 PM CST


    Welcome to wcarchive - home FTP site for Walnut Creek CDROM.
    There are currently 4993 users out of 5000 possible.


  • $ ftp ftp.cdrom.com
    Connected to wcarchive.cdrom.com.
    220 wcarchive.cdrom.com FTP server (Version DG-3.1.27 Wed Dec 2 01:29:08 PST 1998) ready.
    Name (ftp.cdrom.com:[deleted]): ftp
    331 Guest login ok, send your email address as password.
    Password:
    230-Welcome to wcarchive - home FTP site for Walnut Creek CDROM.
    230-There are currently 4399 users out of 5000 possible.
    230-
    230-Most of the files in this area are also available on CDROM. You can send
    230-email to info@cdrom.com for more information or to order, or visit our Web
    230-site at http://www.cdrom.com. For tech support about our products, please
    230-email support@cdrom.com. You may also call our toll-free number:
    230-1-800-786-9907 or +1-925-674-0783. Please keep in mind that we only offer
    230-technical support for our CDROM products and not for the files on our
    230-FTP server.
    230-
    230-This machine is a Xeon/500 with 4GB of memory & 1/2 terabyte of RAID 5.
    230-The operating system is FreeBSD. Should you wish to get your own copy of
    230-FreeBSD, see the pub/FreeBSD directory or visit http://www.freebsd.org
    230-for more information. FreeBSD on CDROM can be ordered using the WEB at
    230-http://www.cdrom.com/titles/os/freebsd.htm or by sending email to
    230-orders@cdrom.com.
    230-
    230-Slow downloads? Please see ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/archive-info/slow.txt
    230-for more information.
    230-
    230-100Mbps colocation services provided by CRL Network Services. For more
    230-information, please visit http://www.crl.com.
    230-
    230-Server machine provided by Micron Electronics. Please visit
    230-http://www.micronpc.com.
    230-
    230-Please send mail to ftp-bugs@ftp.cdrom.com if you experience any problems.
    230-Please also let us know if there is something we don't have that you think
    230-we should!
    230-
    230 Guest login ok, access restrictions apply.
    Remote system type is UNIX.
    Using binary mode to transfer files.
    ftp>
  • They probably didn't give credit to the PC Manufacturer before because from the looks of the old pics, it looked generic. I assume the last was a frankenstein machine build up. I guess they didn't feel like slappin another together this time 'round and picked up a Micron. Personally I like puttin together my PC, part of the fun..., but for biz use I generally like to buy the kind that's already put together..generally takes some hassle out of the process.
  • Did you even bother to read the message?

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • It's nice to see them get an upgrade like this. The load that places like this put out is phenomenal, and they sure can use the power.

    I'd be more than happy to take the old machine off their hands. ;P

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • It's actually a sort of in-joke now, it's usually something like: "Imagine what kind of 3L33T Beowulf cluster you could build with those". It's been said for everything from supercomputers to matchbox servers.

    Basically it's a troll, of the cute variety like you see in alt.folklore.urban from time to time.
  • ftp.cdrom.com has upgraded from 1Gb to 2Gb RAM, not disk...

    A processor with a 32-bit address-bus should technically could address 2^32 bytes of memory (4 Gb). But Linux won't do more than 2Gb or so on a 32-bit processor. Rumour has it that it's because they've used signed integers, but I don't think Linus would have made such an amatour-code. Kinda of remindes me of Bill Gates: "Noone will ever need more than 640k RAM!" :))

  • They've been around for ages, and are a really good business; if you have a chance to support them by buying one of their CD's, do so. It will help pay for this FTP site.

    Good businesses like this deserve to get your business.

  • "downloading every Doom WAD I could get"

    Sheesh... I remember playing Castle Wolfentstein and connecting to BBS's at 300bps with an acoustic coupler.

    I had a VT-52 terminal and a 300bps modem, and I was hot stuff. That was in addition to my 8-bit Atari and Altos CP/M machine. sigh Those were the days!

  • Uh. Last time I checked ftp.cdrom.com and www.microsoft.com were the only two sites that couldnt get slashdotted. And MS is using how many boxes? :P -Tacos man, tacos, and blocks...mmm...keyrate.
  • That is not caused by a hosed routing table, that happens when a router goes down; there should be another router on the same segment as CROM-something.CRL.NET, but it is unreachable, so that router forwards the packet back to T3-something.CRL.NET, as that is it's default gateway and may know an alternate route to the destination.

    If you had an icmp logging type program you would be seeing net/dest unreach messages from the CDROM-something.CRL.NET router.
  • Funny... I spent the same amount for the same computer, except I got a 700Meg drive...

    As a side note, this computer is still in use (though upgraded to an AMD 5x86 133 (OC to 160), and a second 5G drive (new controller).. Its a good IPMASQ machine and small server..

  • you're probably pretty right about that... unless, of course, they ordered from micron exactly what they wanted on it and just let them put it together and warantee it... after all, they had to put their own OS on there (micron do freebsd? forget it... they might THINK about linux, but not freebsd)

    so i'm assuming that that machine will be killer for them... i've seen them break gb/day limits over the last year or two, and always being full... personally, i am willing to stick out my neck and say that that is the MOST used FTP server on the web. I think (and thi is if my memory serves me correct) that their record is sending out 359GB in a day... i could be wrong though... (you'd think that they'd display it somewhere)

    think about this one... when q3atest is released, they'll go for another reocrd day there... i wanna see those stats :-)

    8Complex
  • hmmmmmmm... well personally i don't really consider hard drive a hardware upgrade for an FTP like that... its more of a storage expansion...

    personally, i'd love to log in and just look around... there's so much stuff on that site i can never see it all - i don't even know everything that it covers... all i've seen is the game archive for id and a few of the addon directories...

    8Complex
  • Connection from east to west (US) or vice versa is slower because there is a bottle neck of sorts. I believe I read this somewhere on their page.
  • I got 250-350 k when downloading rh5.2. That is the fastest i've done with my cablemodem.

  • Actually, the login limit is 5000 since the upgrade, and was 3600 for a long time before that.

    For naked, unadultered throughput and usage figures, go see http://www.emsphone.com/stats/cdrom.html. [emsphone.com]

  • > BTW, FreeBSD 3.1-RELEASE *cannot* go all the way to 4 GB without some serious tuning, so there you have.

    Depends on what you consider "serious tuning". You need to grab a recent version of the boot loader (e.g. off of a recent FreeBSD 3.1-STABLE or 4.0-CURRENT installation floppy) and make three rather trivial modifications to the kernel source, as described in section 13.15 of the FAQ [freebsd.org].

    4.0-CURRENT as of late February (or eraly March) and 3.1-STABLE as of late April support large memory configurations out of the box.

    Note that if you patch a 3.1-RELEASE system to support large memory configurations, you will lose BSD/OS binary compatibility. This has been fixed in 4.0-CURRENT and 3.1-STABLE.

  • I'm sorry, but that simply isn't correct. FreeBSD is Walnut Creek CDROM's single largest source of income, and is in no way subsidized by Linux sales. Walnut Creek CDROM is nowhere near financial trouble - in fact, they've been hiring people lately, and spending money quite generously on FreeBSD development.

  • ..you would have read that, and I quote:

    "This machine is a Xeon/500 with 4GB of memory & 1/2 terabyte of RAID 5.
    The operating system is FreeBSD. Should you wish to get your own copy of
    FreeBSD, see the pub/FreeBSD directory or visit http://www.freebsd.org
    for more information. FreeBSD on CDROM can be ordered using the WEB at
    http://www.cdrom.com/titles/os/freebsd.htm or by sending email to
    orders@cdrom.com."


  • Oh wow, it was on Russian news! Well, it certainly must be true, then!

    Russian news and news feeds should be taken with a pound or two of salt. I don't doubt that they have an ftp server, but it's prolly not the fastest in the world. 'Sides, with their money crunch, how many ppl over there (civilians and military) have computers anyway?

    --Andrew Grossman
    grossdog@dartmouth.edu
  • I read that message, but for some reason I must've missed that part about FreeBSD. My bad.
  • But it is one of the great Open Source Projects
  • If designed right, it should be able to access 32 GB.

    Sun has done it already with Solaris 7 3/99 release:

    The Physical Address Extension (PAE) is a new feature of the Intel platform edition of the 3/99 update that provides greater scalability and higher performance for Intel Pentium Pro systems. It allows you to address up to 32 Gbytes of physical memory on a Pentium Pro system. By addressing more physical memory, more processes can reside concurrently in the same physical memory, allowing you to run multiple databases and memory-intensive applications that support large numbers of users.

    I would think that any processor based on the PPro would also be able to access 32GB RAM in the same manner. www.x86.org [ddj.com] has information on using 36-bit paging and 2MB pages on the PPro (though according to them they're called _page_ address extensions, not physical address extensions). Wouldn't that give you 64GB though?

    P.S. I'd lke to see the Intel system that can hold 32GB RAM....
  • I'm thinking that the credit is there because Micron gave them the equipment. Just like they're probably getting the colo service from CRL for free. What do you think?
  • last fall, the disk space was upgraded to half a terabyte, so it really isnt the first upgrade in 2 years.
  • I don't know what's up with Slashdot readers crying 'Beowulf' whenever they see something that needs CPU juice...

    ***Beowulf clusters are only good for _certain_ types of parallel computing problems*** (coarsely grained problems are what it's for...throw something too finely grained at it, and it kills itself with internode communication latency) No more talk of a Beowulf Quake :)

    CJK
  • Maybe I'm just totally missing something there, but your numbers seem to make no sense whatsoever (especially since your required bandwidth figure was twice as big at 2500 users vs. 5000). It's like this:

    - pretend everyone was connected at 28.8 kbps
    - this is 3.6 K (kilobytes, not bits) per second
    - if there are 5000 people @ 3.6 K/second:

    5000 * 3600 bytes/sec = 18,000,000 bytes/sec = 17.17 megabytes/sec

    This is also operating under the fallacy that everyone is on at 28.8 kbps...there will still be some 14.4's...but also lots of 56 kbps...and then lots of people on faster (perhaps from work) links. Heck, I have 1.54 Mbps (T1) in my apartment....just 12 people like me and you're already sucking up more bandwidth than 5000 people @ 28.8...

    CJK
  • LOL, I bought that exact same configuration with a 1 meg video card and a "huge" 15" monitor. I got it specifically to run OS/2 v2.1. I still remember the sales guy mention what a power user system I was getting... and I used to get all my OS/2 shareware off of ftp.cdrom.com not too long after that.
  • Slashdot had
    this [slashdot.org] just last week.
  • You're just looking at it from a different point of view... Allow me to clarify his point:

    Assuming the bottleneck is the ethernet segment, then the machine has the full 100 Mb/s of total bandwidth for transmitting data since it is a full duplex connection. Given that there is a potential 5000 users and assuming the bandwidth was allocated fairly among the users (which it won't be of course), then each user would be limited to 20 Kb/s.

    100 Mb/s / 5000 users = 20 Kb/s per user



  • I'm sorry to hear that your route to wcarchive is so bad. I can assure you that there is plenty of bandwidth available to the box: from home, I get full line speed (150K/second) every time I go there. Of course, they peer directly with my upstream's (Pac Bell DSL) router at PBNAP, so I'm 7 hops from the box (Hey! Waitaminnit! Yt used to be 5! There goes PBI adding more routing between me and the backbone... argh!).

    At work, I've hit 400K/sec, but then we have way more OC-48s into BBN than we know what to do with.
  • 100mbit connection..
    divided by 5000 users..
    = 20000 BITS per second per person.

    Double that. It's a pair of 100Mb connections.

    Not that it helps all that much to go from 2k/sec to 4...

    But then again, cdrom.com doesn't run at 5000 users constantly, like it did with the 3600 limit.
  • As I recall, the 36-bit extention to the Pentium Pro/II/III is an ugly hack. They are 32-bit processors that have a 32-bit address space. Intel just hacked in a little ugly work around to get an extra 4-bits of addressable memory. I think only a special version of Wint can use it. (Maybe FreeBSD can, too. I'm not sure.)

    -- A wealthy eccentric who marches to the beat of a different drum. But you may call me "Noodle Noggin."

  • Last I remember the max userlimit for WC was 3600 users.
  • Actually FreeBSD = REAL UNIX
    Linux = UNIX CLONE

    FreeBSD is based on 386BSD. Linux is something Linus dreamed of when he realized that Minix's licence sucked, so he wrote a clone and GPL'd it. Minix is a clone of Unix, so Linux is actually a clone of a clone. However, more companies are starting to port their software to linux than to FreeBSD. Besides, Linux makes a good PC, FreeBSD makes a good server, any questions?
  • Actually, for machines I use in a business environment, I DEMAND to put them together myself.
    Since I support those machines along with the operating systems running on them, I want to be familiar with the hardware. This helps because I can keep a standardized set of known working hardware and known working brands, and if there is need for a hardware replacement, I know EXACTLY what to get. Warranties are great and all if you don't want to open the machine up to fix it, but since I am used to putting every computer together myself, its no skin off my back.

    I can also generally assemble the computers a lot cheaper by picking and choosing my own parts. And since I can buy them locally, I save the overhead on shipping charges as well.

    Just my opinion, for what its worth.

    -Restil

  • Almost every time I go to ftp.cdrom.com, I get the "Sorry, we've reached our limit of 3000 users" message. That place is bizzzzzy.

    And I don't think it would have any problems with bandwidth... I believe they've broken their own GB/day transfer records a couple of times now.

    I have to say, by the subject of your message I thought you were going to suggest pointing the slashdot effect at that NT cluster in Redmond! :-)

  • I was surprised to read that a site with as much traffic as cdrom.com was running on one machine with one CPU.
    I guess the importance of processor speed is overblown by the media and Intel press releases and not enough attention is given to the importance of lots of RAM and fast hard drives.
    Does anyone know what version of FreeBSD they are running?
  • So now it's Linux against the world not just MS? Any good alternative OS is a welcome thing and FreeBSD is obviously as good as they come. Walnut Creek must choose to run FreeBSD over Slackware for a reason.
  • .. a single zeon makes a kick-ass server, but in the mindshaft testing lab you need a quad zeon! Hmmm.. of course it _was_ optimized for NT - probably the logic was that with 4 cpus running NT, then at any time ONE of them might actually be working!
  • Remember that X is just the low level graphics library - it's what's on top of it (the low level and desktop environment widgets and dialogs) that contribute to an app's look and feel. The currently popular widget sets and environments - qt/KDE and gtk/GNOME are still very young, but improving very fast. Remember that Windows itself was essentially useless until 3.0, and the UI was unusable until Windows '95...

    Remember that the current Linux user base is only in the 12-15 million range, but growing _very_ fast. Mexican schools are adopting Linux/GNOME, and China is likely to be predominantly Linux too for cost reasons (it already has a pretty large Linux user base, and there's only just been released a Chinese version of Linux!)... as the desktop user base grows, there's going to be some very rapid advances...
  • I used to love correcting punch card mistakes using the duplicate button - sounded like a freakin' machine gun! :)
  • FreeBSD != REAL Unix. Its not based off of the AT&T source, FreeBSD inc. does not own the UNIX trademark. FreeBSD is a unix clone, the only difference was that they started it 15 years ago instead of 9.

    That does not make it better. If you just add the x86 bits to the BSD-lite 4.4 source tree, you're going to be in for a nasty surprise.
  • This is because its actually faster. Being able to support 4GB of ram is nice, but not when it cuts down the execute time of syscalls dramatically.

    If you need that much ram, stop using PCs all together. They don't have enough memory bandwidth to serve that much very fast anyways.
  • If it was based off of the source from AT&T, it wouldn't be freely redistributable.

    Its just a re-implmentation of unix.
  • Erm, sorry, but I was out Red Hat 6.0 hunting just a couple of days ago when every ftp site on the planet that mirrors Red Hat was getting smashed, and the too many users error I got from ftp.cdrom.com said 3500.
  • Of course provided by = free. Who in the hell would waste their money on a micron? Yes I hate them and am totally biased but what techie would take a store bought over getting to build their own?

    I wonder what happened to the old server? I think it should become my graduation present. :)

    ~Kevin
  • I still have my TRS-80 model circa 1979-80, 4k of memory, cassette tape drive for program installs. I remember when it was cool to type in a 4k game when the Radio Shack monthly mag came out. Could you imagine trying to type in Quake II :) No speakers accept the internal squeaker. I have an old VT 100 and vt 220 that still work and even an old dual 8inch floppy drive. yipes and I am only 32.
  • Good try troll, but I did't buy it ;)
  • As the other poster I have alos been quite satisfied whith WC and I regulary use them.
    If you and your brother think that downloading from ftp.kernel.org or any other servers
    suites your needs better, more power to you.
  • FreeBSD doesn't have any decent clustering support. ;-)

    Yeah, and Yahoo is a single machine. He, he.
    Of course you can do clustering on FreeBSD. As the above poster said,
    it hasn't been any great interest in it but I know there are some projects.
    None as high profile as the Beowulf thou.

    FreeBSD has been focusing on trying to get best possible performance on
    the most commonly used platform. That's been x86 up to now.
    So that you can run a high traffic porn site like persian kitty, a buisy ftp server like cdrom.com,
    big web servicing like yahoo or a unix workstation like mine on "lousy hardware".
    What will be the most common platform in the future I don't know, but FreeBSD will be there.
    There are also a Alpha port for FreeBSD but it is "alpha".

    Now that there are a lot of attention towards Linux and the money are pouring in from the big guys,
    it is sad that some linux users are bashing BSD when they are getting good press.
  • Your point beeing that FreeBSD sux, right ;)
  • Not that I think you ever contributed to anythig
    useful.
    Beeing an anonymous poster on Slashdot is your faith.
  • Show me the links and numbers please.
    This sounds interesting. I haven't heard about it thou.
  • I think he was talking about RAM/disk.
  • Non-sense. The ability to effectively use 4 GB of RAM is related to memory bandwidth, which is *not* related to word size (these systems do use more than 32 bits for memory transfers).

    I think your problem is one of envy... :-) BTW, FreeBSD 3.1-RELEASE *cannot* go all the way to 4 GB without some serious tuning, so there you have.
  • I think we are comparing oranges and tangerines here. Linux and Free BSD are very similar in theory. While FreeBSD is a little more mature when it comes to the enterprise, Linux is a little more scalable (both up AND down), and is now aiming towards enterprise use.

    BOTH do a better job the NT, and cost much less..

    It comes down to preference. Every OS has its pros and cons. Linux is middle of the road in usabilty. A compromise between the 'supposed' easy to use GUI of NT, which has still yet to be proven in the enterprise, and the raw power of unix (FreeBSD, HP/UX, Solaris, AIX, etc.)

    It comes down to the fact that if you have enough resources, you can do anything.

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