Re: One particular large database application

On Sun, 21 Apr 2002, Francisco Reyes wrote:

> May I suggest a different approach?
> From what I understand this data may not change often.
> How about instead of getting numerous cheap machines get only 2 or 3 good
> machines with 2 15K RPM drives, 4GB of RAM and 1 IDE for the OS.

It won't be as cost-effective. Price increases much faster than
performance for an individual component. Take a look at CPUs for
example:

CPU Cost $/GHz
2.4 GHz P4 $539 $224
2.0 GHz P4 $322 $161
1.9 GHz P4 $225 $118
1.8 GHz P4 $158 $88

For the price of one 2.4 GHz CPU, I can get three 1.8 GHz CPUs,
giving me more than twice the aggregate CPU power, and still have
change left over.

Drives? 73 GB 10K RPM SCSI drives start at $399. I can't even find
a 73 GB 15K RPM drive, but the 36 GB drives are $388 and up. For
$400 I can buy four 7200 RPM IDE drives, and assuming I have them
on separate controllers, I'm going to get much better aggregate
throughput than I could ever get with a single SCSI drive. Not to
mention that I end up with more than four times the storage space
as well.

This is the great thing about distributed systems. The only trick
is distributing your application as well. And that's often a pretty
big trick, otherwise everybody would be doing it.

cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs(at)cynic(dot)net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.netbsd.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC