Rapid once deployed too

[Fairlight]

You'll never BELIEVE what Jay Ashworth said here...:
> 
> FWIW, my client in Tampa is running a dual-HT P4 Dell, and interactive
> response on that machine -- with 9 simultaneous Xvnc chains running
> full time -- is perfectly reasonable up to loadaverages of about 8 or
> so; the highest it's ever gotten (in a runaway) was about 63 before it
> went to sleep.

In my experience, many, many people (I'd almost say most) will toss CPU and
RAM at a system without even looking at system performance on a subsystem
level to find out where their bottlenecks are.  I'd say probably 95%+ of
the systems I've worked on over the last five years alone are overclassed,
sometimes extremely.  People just toss money at it, upgrade 2GB to 4 or 8,
pop in dual cpu's...and they sit there 99.9%+ of the time with a load of
0.01.  

Personally, I wish they'd take the money they have to waste on that much
extra horsepower and just buy -me- the system if they have it to waste
on a system that sits mostly idle.  I could easily max out whatever
they give me with video processing and transcoding work, not to mention
raytracing/rendering and some other really intensive stuff.

It's really sad to see systems sit there at 0.00-0.01 most of their
lifetimes, maybe jumping up to 0.5 when they hit their busiest.  Best and
biggest is great if money is no object, but some of this stuff is sheer
overkill for what it's being used for.  More than half the web servers
I've seen could easily run on P3-700's or less for the amount of use they
see, and yet have dual or even quad 2.4GHz XEON's for some strange reason.
That's a LOT of horsepower.  Do you know how much you have to be doing to
even come close to justifying a quad 2.4 with 6GB?

What's more interesting is that many people will toss CPU and RAM at a
system not realising that disk I/O is really their bottleneck when they
even have a problem.  I've actually heard, "I'm putting in another 2GB of
RAM, maybe that'll help."  Verbatim.  Makes one want to cry, almost--or
laugh, I'm not sure which sometimes.  It's a tragic kind of comedy.

mark->