On Fri, 09 Jan 2004 04:22:05 -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Gabriel Wicke wrote:
Well, the lowest machines that I can find widely available are 2.4Ghz... the state of the art these days is 3.2Ghz. Upgrading from a 2.4Ghz to 2.6ghz is only $28 per CPU (for the celerons).
I've found the cpu to be much less of a price factor for the Apache-class servers than the form factor and ram.
Do you know of a vendor where I could buy 9 2Ghz machines for the price of 5 2.6Ghz machines? Or was that just a hypothetical example?
Shure, dell for one ;-) Tower pcs might be impossible in the colo, but they would save a lot of money while offering the same performance. They're simply produced in different quantities than those 19" boxes.
Someone offered to let me in on their deal with a vendor for last-generation Pentium III boxes, at $800 each. For simple webserving, does it make sense to look at those? Obviously we could get twice as many of those for the money...
See my post re call for configurations- we can get a P4 2.4 for that.
At some point, of course, the management of a lot of servers becomes a hassle. But I don't suppose there's much difference between managing 6 identical webservrs and 12.
If we have many and one goes down, then does it really matter? We could wait for another one to fail so it's worth the hassle. Spare parts would be the same for all anyway (and commonly available).
I'm not a hardware expert- should we avoid companies like Dell? Is there a quality problem with their hardware? I've only looked at their website so far (because i don't know really cheap companies in the us). In Germany there are other major hardware vendors that are cheaper than Dell with the same support/warranty level.