Hi, On Thu, 25 Aug 2005, Shriramana Sharma wrote:
mike wrote:
I had always wondered about who was responsible for the gwdg site. It's one of the best around. I'd like to publicly say thanks for all your work Eberhard.
Oh, Eberhard made that site! Yes, thanks Eberhard (though I've still not used it)! :)
If you have fetched the Beta3 i386 ISOs today, and if you have done it via http://ftp.opensuse.org/, you HAVE used ftp.gwdg.de. ;-)) We did a wonderful trick today (still working): Christoph has done a http redirection at ftp.opensuse.org so that each request for any beta3 i386 iso file gets redirected to http://ftp.gwdg.de/. This way, the i386 iso files never expired in the buffer cache and could get delivered very very fast over the whole day... This way, ftp.gwdg.de was able to deliver up to 85 MByte/sec (max value, reached at 13:00h, again at 14:30 h and 17:00 h) while the real disk I/O was below 20 MByte/sec all the time and still is - with 813 FTP sessions, 1389 HTTP sessions and 95 RSYNC sessions currently. This "general redirection" at http://ftp.opensuse.org/ is still working, so please try it if you still need one of the beta3 i386 ISOs. This idea can be a good brick to build a new distribution scheme. Disk I/O is always a latent bottleneck at the big public servers, and distribution sizes have exploded in a manner that it would be an illusion to cover this bottleneck by increasing the buffer cache. ftp.gwdg.de has 12 GB RAM, resulting in > 10 GB buffer cache, but already SUSE-9.3 was > 16 GB, and 3 days before debian had released 3.01 for all supported platforms, summing in 60 GB if I remember right, and mandrake and FreeBSD had fresh activities too. So we need pools of servers which have the ressources to "nail" some GB of RAM for certain files, and then a dispatch mechanism which redirects the right requests to the right servers. Cheers -e -- Eberhard Moenkeberg (emoenke@gwdg.de, em@kki.org)