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I'm hosting a website on a RAID0 of 30 floppy drives

totallynormalwebsite.ddns.net

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Re: I'm hosting a website on a RAID0 of 30 floppy drives

#3

Post by Nextgrid »

I'd expect the vast majority of IO requests to be served from the kernel's IO cache (we're talking 30 * 1.44MBs here so just under 50MB, trivial for even an old computer to hold in RAM), thus I wouldn't be surprised for it to be very fast and reliable as long as he sticks to read-only workloads - those would never actually touch the floppies beyond the initial read.

Re: I'm hosting a website on a RAID0 of 30 floppy drives

#4

Post by reustle »

Nextgrid wrote: post #3

I'd expect the vast majority of IO requests to be served from the kernel's IO cache (we're talking 30 * 1.44MBs here so just under 50MB, trivial for even an old computer to hold in RAM), thus I wouldn't be surprised for it to be very fast and reliable as long as he sticks to read-only workloads - those would never actually touch the floppies beyond the initial read.

If we hit a lot of random sub folder URLs (that should all 404), would that trigger the webserver to check the drive to see if the file exists and skip the cache?

Re: I'm hosting a website on a RAID0 of 30 floppy drives

#8

Post by rootsudo »

Nextgrid wrote: post #3

I'd expect the vast majority of IO requests to be served from the kernel's IO cache (we're talking 30 * 1.44MBs here so just under 50MB, trivial for even an old computer to hold in RAM), thus I wouldn't be surprised for it to be very fast and reliable as long as he sticks to read-only workloads - those would never actually touch the floppies beyond the initial read.

Would it be more fun to run a live cd webserver only? piece together an old computer, with an old live linux installation, and either run it unupdated or patched and carrying updates it can only apply w/o reboot?

Re: I'm hosting a website on a RAID0 of 30 floppy drives

#9

Post by jewel »

reustle wrote: post #4
Nextgrid wrote: post #3

I'd expect the vast majority of IO requests to be served from the kernel's IO cache (we're talking 30 * 1.44MBs here so just under 50MB, trivial for even an old computer to hold in RAM), thus I wouldn't be surprised for it to be very fast and reliable as long as he sticks to read-only workloads - those would never actually touch the floppies beyond the initial read.

If we hit a lot of random sub folder URLs (that should all 404), would that trigger the webserver to check the drive to see if the file exists and skip the cache?

No. The cache is at the block layer, not the file/directory layer. So the filesystem will look up the directory structure, which will be cached.
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