Linux kernel.org infrastructure
This interesting article
talks about the kernel.org infrastructure used to maintain the Linux kernel.
Overall it's a fascinating little bit of history. It's also intriguing
because it gives an example of running an extremely bandwidth and processor
intensive site. This quote is especially interesting regarding an earlier
verision of kernel.org hosted on a dual PIII.
Serving data with http and ftp is is not very CPU intensive, but
over time the amount of rsync traffic being fed by the kernel.org server
continued to increase, and rsync is CPU intensive. "That's what rsync does"
Peter said, "it trades bandwidth for CPU horsepower. We were getting to the
point where we had all the bandwidth, but the Dual PIII 1.1's couldn't really
keep up." He noted that the load average kept growing, well into triple
digits. Referring to 32-bit systems, Peter noted, "we learned that the Linux
load average rolls over at 1024. And we actually found this out empirically."
That's fairly amazing. Also noteworthy is the bare number of software
optimizations they've thrown at the problem, which basically consisted of
mounting their filesystems with the noatime attribute. Have to double
check that one on some of my busier http boxes.
Slashdot has an article in their FAQ,
detailing their hardware and software mix as well. It probably hasn't been
updated in a while but the basic config described probably remains as detailed
in the FAQ entry.
[/Computers/OS/Linux/#kernel_org.html]
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