About this server (sam)
Stats: 22:12:27 up 21 days, 42 min, 0 users, load average: 0.07, 0.03, 0.01
sam.julianhaight.com is named for the brave
Sam Gamgee, Frodo Baggins' tireless servant from J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy
The Lord of the Rings. It follows a long tradition of Unix machines
named after mythological figures from Tolkien and other classics. Software Hardware Host Why bother to maintain your own server? I maintain my own web server for several reasons:
Why such a slow processor?
-- Linus Torvalds on kernel optimizations for Apache (Open Sources)
Why Unix as opposed to Windows? The short answer
is that it's more appropriate for this application.
The long answer - Microsoft's technology
still lags light-years behind the free, standards-based community.
Microsoft adds gee-whiz
features before they worry about reliability and security
- they put the cart before the horse.
Why ubuntu? ...as opposed to some other Linux package
(Slackware, SUSE)
or some other Unix implementation (BSD, Solaris, SCO).
This one is a little harder to explain rationally. It's mainly because I'm
used to it. There are few real differences between these different flavors
of unix. For most functions, it just comes down to an issue of style. Any
Unix implementation can run most if not all the software that this system
runs. There are some differences in the kernel's speed, but they
are so slight that it's hard to say for sure which is faster for any particular
application. Linux's hardware support has outpaced the other *nix flavours
in recent years. I am able to get information about my server like
CPU temperature. I can boot from the latest 3ware SATA raid controller.
These type of things might be more difficult with freebsd or another
unix.
Why Apache? It's really the only choice.
Sam is hosted by
Accretive Technology
in a Switch and Data
facility in Seattle's internet nexus, the Westin office building.
"This kind of optimization has been slowed down by the limits in
network bandwidth. At present, you saturate ten-megabit networks so
easily that there's no reason to optimize more.
Intel would like you to think
that a fast processor is as important now as it was in 1985, but the truth
is that for most applications, the CPU is hardly utilized. As the load
average above will no doubt confirm, this machine is no different.
A load of 1.00 is full utilization of the CPU. The machine can still run
smoothly up to a load of ~3.00, and run acceptably up to around ~15.00
(depending on your personal frustration level).
Realistically, a web server only has to be as fast as it's connection to the
internet. While this connection is faster than it needs to be, the
Internet is a fairly slow medium compared with the age-old 10baseT standard
(approximately 2 megabits).
286s were acting as file servers for 10baseT networks long before the Internet
was popular and although serving web pages is a harder job than serving files,
a pentium is still more than adequate.