111–120 of 236 posts
The latter is always interesting to me, building things is easy. Building rock solid reliable things is seriously hard work and often difficult.
Would make a great blog post....
+10% for the proper use of decimated
You mean, that one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(Roman_army) Then it would be 90 ms -> 81 ms, not 90 ms -> 9 ms. The way I see it, at least. With proper decimation, 90% of what was there remains. ("removal of a tenth", as wikipedia puts it).
I was, long ago, an old-school Unix sysadmin. While I was technically aware of how powerful smallish servers have become, this article really crystallized that for me. 64 cores and 24 NVME drives in a 2U spot on a rack is just insane compared to what we used to have to do to get a beefy database server. And it's not some exotic thing, just a popular mainstream Dell SKU. If you price it out on Dell's site, you get a r…
Interesting they decide to put in PCIE 3.0 NVMe SSD instead of PCI-E 4?
Imagine having 24x Intel Optane [1]. PCI-E 5 is actually just around the corner. I would imagine next time Let's Encrypt could upgrade again and continue to use a Single DB Machine to Serve.
[1] https://www.servethehome.com/new-intel-optane-p5800x-100-dwp...
What are they storing on this server that requires 150Tb of storage and millions of IOPS?
My thoughts exactly ... They are creating and storing text. Only thing I can think is that they don't actually need the storage, but just want the lowest possible latency by having a large number of drives.
I was, long ago, an old-school Unix sysadmin. While I was technically aware of how powerful smallish servers have become, this article really crystallized that for me. 64 cores and 24 NVME drives in a 2U spot on a rack is just insane compared to what we used to have to do to get a beefy database server. And it's not some exotic thing, just a popular mainstream Dell SKU. If you price it out on Dell's site, you get a r…
Totally. 2 TB of RAM! In one box! I think the first servers I had in production had 8 MB RAM. No more, certainly. Soon we'll be at 1000x that. My dad's first "server" was 3 orders of magnitude smaller, with 8 KB of RAM (hand-wound wire core memory). In that time, the US population hasn't even doubled.
The listed servers are from few years ago so I guess there might be some bigger ones available these days.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Based on their stated 225M sites and a renewal period of 90 days, they're probably averaging around 40 certificates per second. That's only an order of magnitude higher than bitcoin; I wouldn't call it an indication of an ability to scale to a particularly large amount of traffic.
Yes. They are not doing a very heavy computational workload. Typical heavy-duty servers these days can do 100k's or millions of TPS. 40 TPS is a really, really, really light load. Further, I was looking at those new server specs. There's an error I think? The server config on the Dell site shows 2x 8 GB DRIMMs, for 16 GB RAM per sever, whereas the article says 2 TB! With only 16GB of RAM, but 153.6 TB of NVMe storage…
I was, long ago, an old-school Unix sysadmin. While I was technically aware of how powerful smallish servers have become, this article really crystallized that for me. 64 cores and 24 NVME drives in a 2U spot on a rack is just insane compared to what we used to have to do to get a beefy database server. And it's not some exotic thing, just a popular mainstream Dell SKU. If you price it out on Dell's site, you get a r…
Totally. 2 TB of RAM! In one box! I think the first servers I had in production had 8 MB RAM. No more, certainly. Soon we'll be at 1000x that. My dad's first "server" was 3 orders of magnitude smaller, with 8 KB of RAM (hand-wound wire core memory). In that time, the US population hasn't even doubled.
I don't understand why they are trying so hard to avoid sharding. It seems to me that this is a perfect example of an "embarassingly parallel" problem for which sharding would be borderline trivial. What am I missing?