[Tfug] Need help on a server performance issue...

[Zack Williams]

> Somebody else mentioned "pennywise/pound foolish".  Umm...no, not
> really.  What they have right now is slowish but it does work.  Uptime
> on that "ghetto server" has been as good as anything I've ever run.
> And that one time when the motherboard blew up, getting it back up in
> under 2hrs including drive time back and forth to my place impressed
> the hell out of 'em.

You're lucky with hardware reliability - that generation of hardware
(Pentium 2, original Athlon) is notoriously reliable, as it predated
most of the capacitor failure, and as most of the components are
passively cooled it lacks the plethora of fans to fail, and even if
they did it can sometimes survive with ambient cooling.

Also, while you made a good save the time you mentioned, that's
probably a best case scenario, and you would need to consider the
worst case scenario and other failure modes to make a correct
assessment.   There's a good article in the current issue of .login by
Limoncelli about this...

- Zack