Re: Are we losing users to Gentoo?
On Thu, Nov 21, 2002 at 05:48:47PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
Disks are still $1 per gigabyte. IDE disks are more than sufficient
for this task, aren't they?
No.
IDE is great for most applications these days, IMHO, but not on a server
where dozens or hundreds of clients are going to be causing random seeks
all over your disk. *Especially* since increasing the number of
cpu-specific optimized packages is going to decrease locality of
reference in the archive and greatly increase the number of cache
misses. (An expensive mirror these days could cache the active set
fairly well. Start increasing the archive size by whole number
increments, especially when that action starts spreading out the i386
users--currently the lion's share of access is to that one spot--and
you'll be excercising the disks a lot more than you do now.) There are
side effects to what you propose...
Other disks run--omigosh--up to $2 per gigabyte.
No, a decent 15k rpm scsi disk from a reputable vendor (with a warranty,
not off the back of a truck) is going to cost more like $10 per
gigabyte. It will cost more on our backend, where we'd really like raid
(not as important on a mirror, but people don't generally buy just one.)
Mirrors are quite free to decide not to download anything but the i386
packages. Surely doing this job right would involve making sure that
this is possible and works well. So adding extra to our stock
wouldn't increase *anything* except for those who choose to carry
more.
Or they'll find it too much work and give up. I'd rather not push and
find out.
Ordinary users download what they actually need, and wouldn't download
any more than they do now.
I think you'll find that it's quite common for users to download more
than they actually need. Take a look at the numbers who download whole
cd's rather than just the packages they need, or who mirror a whole
architecture rather than using a web cache or such. Now they'll need to
download a whole cd set or mirror for every architecture they own. (Hmm,
I'll need the athlon archive for my desktop, the pIII archive for my
laptop, and a p4 archive for work.)
Mike Stone
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