My £60 ARM server • Hacker News Board

Re: My £60 ARM server

#41

Post by argus » Wed, May 23, 2012, 10:36 AM UTC

rythie wrote: post #38

lucaspiller wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking about this as well... maybe not in comparison to cheap providers whose performance are variable, but for £12/month from Linode you can get a 512mb VPS with 20GB of disk space. How does the performance of this ARM box compare to a Linode?

Well, for a ballpark figure: md5sum of 3.4 kernel.tar.gz (average of three runs) 512Mb Slicehost 2.2Ghz Quad-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2374 HE = 0.275 seconds 512Mb BeagleBoard XM 1GHz Cortex A8 = 2.023 seconds

where was the file stored on the beagle? that could explain a good part of the difference in results you're getting.

Re: My £60 ARM server

#42

Post by j_col » Wed, May 23, 2012, 10:40 AM UTC

Very cool, I've been wanting to do something similar with a personal server for some time.

Re: My £60 ARM server

#43

Post by darklajid » Wed, May 23, 2012, 10:44 AM UTC

Another site that is unreadable on a mobile device because the options to share the content are hiding the content itself.

Is there any browser/browser & extension to remove that... stuff? Maybe an adblock filter, a greasemonkey script or something similar?

Re: My £60 ARM server

#44

Post by rythie » Wed, May 23, 2012, 10:49 AM UTC

argus wrote: post #41

rythie wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, for a ballpark figure: md5sum of 3.4 kernel.tar.gz (average of three runs) 512Mb Slicehost 2.2Ghz Quad-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2374 HE = 0.275 seconds 512Mb BeagleBoard XM 1GHz Cortex A8 = 2.023 seconds

where was the file stored on the beagle? that could explain a good part of the difference in results you're getting.

time dd if=linux-3.4.tar.bz2 of=/dev/null

is 0.7 seconds on the beagleboard and slicehost is more variable but comes to down to 0.5 seconds after a few goes from (1 second). I'd expect it to be read from the page cache anyway.

However, I remembered that the beagleboard is using busybox and really the systems are very different from each other, different distribution for example.

Update: busybox md5sum is about 20% slower than regular md5sum.

Re: My £60 ARM server

#45

Post by rwmj » Wed, May 23, 2012, 10:52 AM UTC

rythie wrote: post #27

If it had a lot more memory that would be interesting. Though really you can get a 256Mb VPS for £5/month http://prgmr.com/xen/ and you don't have a setup charge or unreliable hardware.

ARM has strange limits on the amount of memory. The Versatile architecture supports up to 256 MB max. The Versatile Express architecture has a 2GB limit (and no PCI!)

Then you have to remember that ARM is presently 32 bit, so you're going to have trouble going over 4 GB at all, which is currently a very small amount for a serious server. 64 bit ARM isn't going to be widely available for at least another 2 years, and at what cost we just don't know (but it's not likely to be £60/server).

Re: My £60 ARM server

#46

Post by gizzlon » Wed, May 23, 2012, 11:16 AM UTC

On a related note, VIA makes small motherboards with embedded CPU's. They're not as cheap, but they act more like "real" pc hardware, are i386/686 compatible and use very little power.

I've run a fan-less EPIA board at home for a couple of years, and it's nice. Took some time to find the right board though..

http://www.viaembedded.com/en/products/boards/

Re: My £60 ARM server

#47

Post by EwanToo » Wed, May 23, 2012, 11:27 AM UTC

darklajid wrote: post #43

Another site that is unreadable on a mobile device because the options to share the content are hiding the content itself. Is there any browser/browser & extension to remove that... stuff? Maybe an adblock filter, a greasemonkey script or something similar?

Someone else pointed that out, it's not good is it?

I've disabled the AddThis bar while I look into it (the caches might keep it alive for a while though), hopefully there's a suitable solution.

Re: My £60 ARM server

#48

Post by nico_h » Wed, May 23, 2012, 11:46 AM UTC

jgrahamc wrote: post #33

nico_h wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was browsing with firefox with 3rd party cookies disabled, and I saw this message a few times. What irks me and triggered my kvetching is that I "played the game" and did submitted the captcha 3 times and it still didn't work. Twice in Firefox and once in Safari in private browsing mode. Here is a screenshot, with my I.P. address at the bottom: http://imgur.com/n9xFG It looks scam-y too with the "google pays me $x…

Thanks. I'll take this up with the folks in San Francisco and see why you were seeing that.

Thank you for looking into it.

Re: My £60 ARM server

#49

Post by timthorn » Wed, May 23, 2012, 12:49 PM UTC

runeks wrote: post #24

"[...] ARM servers are a big part of the future [...]" Has anyone actually compared x86 and ARM doing some sort of comparable task, and measured how much power they both consume performing the same task? I know ARM uses a lot less power than x86, but if it uses 10 times as little power but takes 20 times as long to do the same task as an x86 server chip, it still uses more power. I'm not saying it isn't more power ef…

It all depends on the workload, but one public comparison (from the vendor and in a press release, but with some figures):

http://www.low-latency.com/blog/cantor-evaluating-calxeda-ar...

Re: My £60 ARM server

#50

Post by driverdan » Wed, May 23, 2012, 12:59 PM UTC

EwanToo wrote: post #15

nico_h wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to read your fine post from the google cache, missing on the pretty pictures: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hUwlhkh...

Hmm, I might need to disable cloudflare then, frustrating really as it's a clever service.

Set the CloudFlare security level to low. I found anything above low results in too many false positives which ends up frustrating legit users like nico. I don't know why 3rd party cookies would matter though.