[jasonkester]

This sounds like an edge case to me. Now that it's no longer 1998, most of us don't spec out $500,000 boxes for our stuff anymore. A $5,000 box will get you a long way for just about anything you need to do.

I suspect that the author is looking at a problem that would require tons of hardware regardless of how well it was optimized. Evidence of this can be found in the fact that even after tons of optimization, his $1.5M setup is still running at 20% load steady state.

Our single <$5,000 box handles about 4M pageviews per day without moving the cpu above 5% steady state. That's the sort of baseline I'm used to from the Microsoft stack, so it causes me to question whether the author is really looking at a mainstream case.

[kscaldef]

> Our single <$5,000 box handles about 4M pageviews per day without moving the cpu above 5% steady state. That's the sort of baseline I'm used to from the Microsoft stack

You realize how meaningless a statement like this is, right? You just can't go around talking about "pageviews" as if they were some uniform measure of workload.

[sho]

Yeah, I was about to mention that. 4M a day is about 50/sec; if it's nothing but static pages you could serve that on a Pentium 1 without breaking a sweat. I've been giving away P4s recently, so their value is effectively zero - they can probably do it at under 5% too.

The problem is obviously when you're not serving static pages.