Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2001 22:37:44 -0600 From: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com> To: Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com> Cc: Robert Watson <rwatson@freebsd.org>, r.hyunseog@ieee.org, hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Interesting article. Message-ID: <3ADA7717.BFFF01AB@softweyr.com> References: <200104101733.NAA09610@renown.cnchost.com>
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Bakul Shah wrote:
>
> Though, a lack of good Unicode support on FreeBSD seems like
> a legitimate enough reason for the move.
Yes, it would, if it were true, see /usr/ports/devel/libunicode.
> Regardless, note that doubling of the performance meant they
> saved anywhere from $10M to $20M (5000 servers x (price +
> maintenance of each server) - development and testing costs).
> Another doubling would still save them $5M or so! I'd take
> that challenge if I can get 50% of the savings!:-)
In order to determine if they really made any savings or not -- I
notice that they've increased the number of servers at Hotmail from
3,400 to 5,000 - you'd also have to determine how much they could have
improved the performance by merely writing their code as an Apache
module. In my experience, if they were running on a relatively
unmodified Apache CGI interface and using compiled C or C++ CGI's,
they could easily double their performance by making the same code
into a module, an exercise that should take a couple of experienced
programmers a few weeks to do, at worst.
They specifically mention the process-per-socket model in Apache,
but don't mention attempting to do any performance tuning on it.
The obvious first experiment would be a pre-forked server; another
would be to replace the process per socket with a single process
and I/O selection via select(2) or kqueue(2).
So, was that 18 month development project really necessary from a
technical standpoint, or only justified as a marketing cost? Nobody
outside Microsoft management will ever really know.
--
"Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?"
Wes Peters Softweyr LLC
wes@softweyr.com http://softweyr.com/
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