Old Dual Pentium III 500Mhz Servers

[Tim]

On Tue, 2009-11-10 at 23:47 +1100, David Timms wrote:
> Things to think about:
> - if you are talking about the same machine, disk drive tiredness
> would have reduced the access speed that you can achieve, when r/w to
> disk.

Beg yours...  drive tiredness?  The old gray mare not what she used to
be?  Since when do drives become old age pensioners with blankets on
their laps, day dreaming about the old days, instead of doing the same
as they were doing last week?

> - more stuff relying on storage/retrieval of information from 
> inefficient storage formats like xml

Reminds me of back when I was using an Amiga - any program that stored
its configuration in a text file took ages to parse it as the program
started up.  Whereas those that stored their data in the programs binary
format were very nippy.

Even now, on fast GHz CPUs, I've noticed that you can get Apache or
Squid to start up much quicker if you purged the masses of comments out
of the configuration file, so the program had less to parse.

Yes, the programs do parse the comments, they've got to find the end of
the comment to find the next instructions that they're going to use, the
whole file is parsed.

And, yes, I know there's other advantages in text based configuration
files (you can tweak them yourself, and the program designer can be lazy
about creating GUI/TUI configuration routines).  But, on the other side
of the coin, a configurator can be designed to not let the user pick
mutually exclusive options.

> If we consider moore's law saying we'll get a doubling of CPU 
> performance every 18 months, the corollary must be we'll bloat our os 
> and applications to at least exceed the above as operational 
> requirements; end result is actual decline in capability over time...

Computer users nightmare number 9:  Part way through the installation
process, a message pops up, "You're going to need a bigger boat"