I’m not going to publish any benchmarks on how apache does just by itself on the T2000. The reason is simple: I don’t have a gigabit switch where the machine is currently located, just a 100 Mbps switch, and the results Colm MacCárthaigh got shows that the T2000 can saturate all four of it’s gigabit interfaces. Instead I’ll concentrate on applications in the near future. Here’s Colm’s results, summarized:

[Quote:]

How many requests the machine can handle in a second is probably the most valuable statistic when talking about webserver performance. It’s a direct measure of how many user requests you can handle. Fellow ASF committer, Dan Diephouse, has been producing some interesting stats for requests-per-second for webservices (and they are impressive), however we were more interested in how many plain-old static files the machine could really ship in a hurry. And without further ado, those numbers are;

[..]

As you can see, the T2000 was able to sustain about 83,000 concurrent downloads, and my limited dtrace skills tell me that thread-creation at that point seemed to be the main limiting factor, which is hardly surprising. For us, that number represents an upper limit on what the machine could handle when faced with a barrage of clients. Of course, no server should ever be allowed to get into that kind of insane territory, but it’s always good to know that there is plenty of headroom. More to the point, it means that availability at the lower levels of concurrency is much higher.

[..]

Overall, the T2000 performs very impressively. At very low numbers of concurrency, it actually has a higher latency than either of the Dell machines we tested, but these latencies are of the order of tens of milliseconds. In other words, the network latency makes a bigger difference in the overall scheme of things.

As I said in an earlier post on the T2000, most datacenters have a limit on how much power one rack cabinet can draw. Here in the Netherlands, the max is mostly set at about 4000 Watts, or about 16 Amps. A few years ago I found out the hard way that (Intel based) computers draw significantly more during powerup – the datacenter I was hosting my own servers at in Amsterdam had a (very rare) power outage, and when power came back, the entire rack of computers tried to boot at the same time, and triggered the 16 Amps surge protector. I had to come in (early on a Sunday, of course) and switch the rack on one by one.

A quick test shows the Pentium 4 machine I’ve been testing with draws about 1.6 Amps, the T2000 about 1. I’ll probably do some performance tests with a Sun 440 as well later on, but I don’t know offhand how much power that machine draws. More, if I recall correctly.

Anyway, you do the math: fill a cabinet with pentium 4′s and see where you max out and fill a cabinet with T2000′s – the T2000 wins hands down with “performance per watt”.

So it won’t just save you a lot on floor space and your energy bill, it may just save you from an early Sunday trip as well…

Nu negerzoenen niet meer mogen, is een campagne tegen blanke vla natuurlijk logisch…

Available here.

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“I say let the prisoners pick the fruits,” said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California, one of more than a dozen Republicans who took turns condemning a Senate bill that offers an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants an opportunity for citizenship.

So let’s consider the imagery on this one, shall we?

There are nearly 1.5 million prisoners incarcerated in state and federal prisons across the USA. Of those approximately 45% are African American, even though they make up only 13% of the population.

The proposal here is to deport the undocumented immigrants and replace them with an indentured population which is highly disproportionately African American. And in states like Alabama where African Americans are over 60% of the prison population? Well, it’s going to look an awful lot like 1850 there.

Apparently there is a cross-promotion between The Apprentice and Chevy to “make your own ad”. It’s a good bet that this is NOT what they had in mind.

If you’re wondering why I prefer Google over MSN, check out the search results at MSN for my own name:

http://www.mymsnsearch.com/results.aspx?q=John+Sinteur&FORM=35TpnYVudYne

update: Okay, so maybe I should have waited a day before posting it and turn it into an April Fools day joke, and regular msn users would have spotted the strange URL anyway, but I had Maarten point out something cool in the real MSN search results for my name. Here’s a screenshot:

The “odd” thing here is that the technorati results, and my postings on the CoolThreads T2000 machine are higher than my work on the anti-spam plugin for WordPress, even ‘though that has been much, much longer on my website. According to my statistics, I still get lots of visitors daily for the anti-spam plugin, and although the T2000 postings are getting lots of hits as well, the ranking of the search results are a surprise to me…

Oh, and if you want to create your own joke MSN search results, go here.

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Does praying for a sick person’s recovery do any good?

In the largest scientific test of its kind, heart surgery patients showed no benefit when strangers prayed for their recovery.

And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications. The researchers could only guess why.

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A one-two punch of bleaching from record hot water followed by disease has killed ancient and delicate coral in the biggest loss of reefs scientists have ever seen in Caribbean waters.

Researchers from around the globe are scrambling to figure out the extent of the loss. Early conservative estimates from Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands find that about one-third of the coral in official monitoring sites has recently died.

“It’s an unprecedented die-off,” said National Park Service fisheries biologist Jeff Miller, who last week checked 40 stations in the Virgin Islands. “The mortality that we’re seeing now is of the extremely slow-growing reef-building corals. These are corals that are the foundation of the reef … We’re talking colonies that were here when Columbus came by have died in the past three to four months.”

[..]

“This is probably a harbinger of things to come,” said John Rollino, the chief scientist for the Bahamian Reef Survey. “The coral bleaching is probably more a symptom of disease — the widespread global environmental degradation — that’s going on.”

Crabbe said evidence of global warming is overwhelming.

“The big problem for coral is the question of whether they can adapt sufficiently quickly to cope with climate change,” Crabbe said. “I think the evidence we have at the moment is: No, they can’t. ”

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