On Mon, 12 Jan 2004, Magnus Manske wrote:
Here's a crazy thought: Is there a way to make a server identify itself as a *harddrive* on the SCSI bus? If so, we could take a machine with lots of RAM which does nothing else than holding most of the DB in cache (cheaper and faster than Compact Flash:-) and occasionally write stuff to its hard drives. Probably won't need much of a CPU, and maybe not even SCSI drives, just cheap IDE ones, as all it does is caching.
Then, we could plug that thing into the "real" DB server, which just sees a really fast HD.
Well, one can dream...
Wouldn't the "harddrive" server be equivalent to the local RAM cache, only accessed via the SCSI bus? it seems to me that it would work in the same fashion - retrieve articles from the DB, cache them in RAM, and send them over the SCSI bus - exactly what the actual server is doing. You're just adding the RAM caches together, one local, one over a SCSI bus. Double the RAM on the primary server, and you're better off :) (I'm assuming that OS and application RAM overhead are minimal, which is probably true on a 4GB+ machine).
Alfio