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2,500 continuous runtime hours on a 4.77Mhz DOS web server

brutmanlabs.org

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Re: 2,500 continuous runtime hours on a 4.77Mhz DOS web server

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still beeping ... busy != dead. Right now it's getting hammered pretty hard. I haven't implemented the clustering and load balancing yet. It can serve 8 concurrent connections but that slows it down. It will queue a few more too; be patient and you will be rewarded.

May be fun to listen to a recording of the beeps.

I took 30 seconds of video with the beeping and the screen scrolling for posterity. I'll get it posted somewhere.

Re: 2,500 continuous runtime hours on a 4.77Mhz DOS web server

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a 486 go through a tornado where the entire building was torn apart. Completely soaked. Brought it home, let it dry for a few weeks. Worked fine for a few years after as a mp3 player.

That must have been a beefy 486, as I remember I had trouble getting a Pentium 100 Mhz Toshiba laptop to play mp3's on Linux kernel ver 2.4, and it could only do so from the bash shell without XWindows running. It could manage it on Windows 98, though, but only with the windows media player, if I remember correctly. Winamp 2 was a bit of a CPU hog for some reason, even though I never used visualizations.

> That must have been a beefy 486

Just drop the discretisation to 22kHz and it would be fine on Am486DX4/100. If you drop to 11kHz you can even do some other things at that time.

Re: 2,500 continuous runtime hours on a 4.77Mhz DOS web server

#83
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What were the other major flaws?

* No standard ISA slots, instead a bulky and expensive ”sidecar” system * Partially incompatible with regular IBM PC software * Max 128K RAM IBM likely did this stuff on purpose to avoid cannibalizing PC sales, but it ended up killing the Jr. Later on Tandy would borrow the PCjr sound and graphics hardware (superior to a normal CGA PC/XT) for a line of more successful personal computers.

And very expensive for all of that.

Re: 2,500 continuous runtime hours on a 4.77Mhz DOS web server

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a 486 go through a tornado where the entire building was torn apart. Completely soaked. Brought it home, let it dry for a few weeks. Worked fine for a few years after as a mp3 player.

That must have been a beefy 486, as I remember I had trouble getting a Pentium 100 Mhz Toshiba laptop to play mp3's on Linux kernel ver 2.4, and it could only do so from the bash shell without XWindows running. It could manage it on Windows 98, though, but only with the windows media player, if I remember correctly. Winamp 2 was a bit of a CPU hog for some reason, even though I never used visualizations.

WinAmp + Windows 98 on a DX2 66.

Now, if you did anything on the computer other than let WinAmp play without the flame graph, it would stutter. I had the machine under my desk and used VNC to connect to it and change tracks or whatever.

Re: 2,500 continuous runtime hours on a 4.77Mhz DOS web server

#85

Is there a link with more info (while we wait for the server to catch up)? Sorry if I missed it! Edit: misread the CPU as a 486 somehow. I was wondering why the clock speed was so low.

486? Nah. 4.77Mhz NEC V20, which is just slightly faster than an 8088. This should tide you over: http://www.brutman.com/PCjr/pcjr_web_server.html The main page is the best link. You might want to try back later after the initial rush; the machine is getting pounded.

Got through today. Very impressive work!

Re: 2,500 continuous runtime hours on a 4.77Mhz DOS web server

#87

Somehow this is even more interesting after reading that OP is a Site Reliability Engineer for Google. http://www.brutman.com/Michael_Brutman_resume.pdf

Sadly the project is mostly unrelated to my day job. I started mTCP at least 6 years before joining Google and at most of my time at Google is spent on much less fun things. On the plus side, when I finally do get around to building a cluster of these and a load balancer I'll know what to do. ;)

Its probably on par with the feature set of googles internal load balancers :P

Re: 2,500 continuous runtime hours on a 4.77Mhz DOS web server

#88
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is astonishing if water got on the motherboard

I had a 486 go through a tornado where the entire building was torn apart. Completely soaked. Brought it home, let it dry for a few weeks. Worked fine for a few years after as a mp3 player.

That seems plausible to me cause the power probably got knocked out and reduced shorting risk

Re: 2,500 continuous runtime hours on a 4.77Mhz DOS web server

#89

So how do you apply the latest DOS security patches without rebooting?

I'm sure I can go for a few more years until the next patch ... On a more serious note, the web server is the problem here. I've tried to run long periods of time before but eventually it would crash. I finally found a 10+ year old parsing bug that wasn't handling quoting correctly, and it was some sort of crypto coin mining JSON request that tripped the bug. So even what I thought was bullet proof years ago turned o…

This is a priceless anecdote, thanks for sharing!

Re: 2,500 continuous runtime hours on a 4.77Mhz DOS web server

#90

The last time I checked on a FreeBSD server running Apache httpd for a previous client, it had an uptime of about 4,000 days. So here is the obligatory: "Here's a nickle, kid. Get yourself a better computer."[0] :-D 0 - https://web.archive.org/web/20190304153157im_/https://assets...

FreeBSD is crusty, but is it really bad enough to compare to DOS 5.02? Besides, who needs 32 bits when 16 will do ... (Not serious.)

Haha :) I always extend my respect for such stuff.. It just shows how everything is bloated and ballooned today.. You barelly can browse modern web with 32bit today.. VSZ hits the sky (3GB).
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