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104 Comments
- pyrates, on 02/10/2008, -25/+91I call it luck. Nothing more. It managed to get its hits just under the amount before it would fail is all. After all, the website was hosted on all of them to share the load.
- 10scott10, on 02/10/2008, -3/+60wouldn't it be ironic if this story killed the server
- inactive, on 02/10/2008, -15/+66buried as inaccurate...server is dead. http://littledork.err0neous.org/
- dbr_onix, on 02/10/2008, -1/+40It's noting to do with "luck", it's to do with what was being served up by the server.
Even the crappiest machine on a home connection can serve up a static HTML file with no problems.
What takes down most servers is stuff like PHP scripts being run on each page load, or more commonly, PHP opening connections to a MySQL server, which uses a lot of memory, and if the PHP scripts don't close the connection, it then refuses new connections. - benroy, on 02/10/2008, -6/+42I have a toaster oven from the 60's that still works.
Big Deal... - err0neous, on 02/10/2008, -3/+38I've got the machine back up, I never really expected it to become popular in any way so I haven't done any apache or netbsd performance tuning. I'll tweak a few things, hopefully it will remain stable. I plan on doing another one of these with a more recent version of netbsd and additional storage.
- frazw, on 02/10/2008, -4/+34I'm certain PC hardware of the same era would fair just as well under the same conditions. These sorts of stories are quite typical of the underdog group.
You don't see stories like this for the PC because PC fans/manufacturers/users don't need to make claims that the PC has superior hardware because the market favours the PC. If the Mac was dominant and the PC the underdog I'd be willing to bet I'd see this or a similar story being about a PC.
This is not an attack on Apple or Apple fans, I just saying it is a pointless story, I'd be more willing to call this a triumph for NetBSD and Apache than the hardware. - _skin_, on 02/10/2008, -2/+28Update 2/9/08
Sorry about the downtime. NetBSD didn't like the Digg effect this time and paniced. Thanks for looking. - LoudMusic, on 02/10/2008, -0/+19So it actually wasn't a Mac at all, it was a BSD server.
- andywebb95, on 02/10/2008, -3/+21Nice reuse of 20 year old hardware and I am impressed but not that surprised :)
Other than the guestbook (cgi) it appears that this site is only serving up static content, which is usually not a hard task for a web server... as it only has to serve up the content (not generate it and then serve it) and there is not much content on this site.
So as long as the site (as currently written) has plenty of bandwidth (a big enough tube) I would imagine it would handle a decent load.
If more dynamic content was placed on the site (PHP, etc.) which causes the server to generate pages on the fly it would probably reduce the load it could handle. - srosebush, on 02/10/2008, -2/+18All your base are belong to us!!!!
http://littledork.err0neous.org/media/ayb2.swf - darkane, on 02/10/2008, -3/+19REDICULOUS? Your spelling is ridiculous...
- inactive, on 02/10/2008, -1/+14...Erotic? I don't even want to know...
- inactive, on 02/10/2008, -0/+12But does it run NetBSD?
- DeeprBlue, on 02/10/2008, -1/+13I read this twice as "Old Man server survives Digg."
- spinchange, on 02/10/2008, -6/+17uptime summary of all the Mac's showcased in the original post:
http://www.pingdom.com/reports/1qmidp4d0jsb/ - griz, on 02/10/2008, -1/+11The IIci is a desktop.
- _skin_, on 02/10/2008, -4/+13Sorry about the downtime. NetBSD didn't like the Digg effect this time and paniced. Thanks for looking.
- radix2, on 02/10/2008, -1/+10This story isn't really about Macs (I could achieve the same thing and easier with commodity PC hardware at the same time - with enough RAM, disk and NetBSD or maybe Linux). The story is about choosing the content you serve and how well seemingly braindead hardware can still deal with the task. That said - if this has an unstable connection it could bring it down via ACK/NAK issues
- smek2, on 02/10/2008, -1/+10Yes, because "luck" is at work when it comes to web-servers. Not technology. You idiot, why do you talking about things you have no clue about? BSD Servers are known to have the most uptime from all servers. That's not luck. That's a high quality OS.
- spinchange, on 02/10/2008, -2/+11haha, it was inevitable, i guess. i kind of expected it to happen...it's a twenty year-old box, probably on a residential connection ;)
- ubergeek09, on 02/10/2008, -0/+9Of course it is, it's running BSD. BSD is insanely awesome for servers.
- Wartz, on 02/10/2008, -0/+9it's a BSD server.
Just because the Mustang and the Focus share the same roots at Ford(the Model T) doesn't mean you can show your slightly battered 3 year old Focus off as "this is practically a Mustang! they share the same roots!" - naterpoke, on 02/10/2008, -0/+8unix is amazing
- andywebb95, on 02/10/2008, -0/+8Also looking at the other Macs listed in the article it looks like (unless I missed something)
- each of them was using the Mac web server
- the Mac web server runs under the classic Mac OS
- the classic Mac OS is not would I consider a stable multitasking/multi-user OS... so you can just imagine what happens to these poor machines when they get hit with hundreds of contiguous requests.
But the machine in question is running running BSD and using Apache as its web server.
BSD/Apache is a far more stable platform than what these other machines were/are running. - mancat, on 02/10/2008, -0/+7I had a maxx'ed out Mac IIcx up until a couple years ago. 32MB RAM and lots of disk. After running NetBSD for some time, I decided to try out A/UX, had it installed, and left the machine running as a file server for about a month when it suddenly stopped working. Opened it up and found that several capacitors had popped :(
Be gentle to your old hardware folks! - hitokiri808, on 02/10/2008, -2/+9I say its the BSD and configurations, more than it being an Apple machine. I use to have a Pentium running linux cli just for apache, until I upgraded to a PIII running MS Server 2003. Sadly, the "upgrade" has more downtime due to having to update itself.
- frazw, on 02/10/2008, -0/+7Ok but as far as the server is concerned that is static content. It is big I'll grant you but the client is doing the processing for that
- mattmcm, on 02/10/2008, -0/+6I'd buy that for a dollar.
- Xerophon, on 02/10/2008, -0/+6That server's the exact same age as me,
20th September 1989
0.o - hitokiri808, on 02/10/2008, -0/+6Thats when we still used quality construction.
- sega01, on 02/10/2008, -1/+6It takes very little CPU to flood even a 10Mbit connection with static content (using a decent software setup, not Windows). I even broke the year 2000 bandwidth transfer record (which has been broken many times now) with two AMD 3500+ machines on gigabit. My VPN/backup server is an AMD K6-2 and my main webserver is a 500Mhz P3 Katamai. If the old Mac was serving up PHP pages, I would be impressed.
- inactive, on 02/10/2008, -0/+5I bet a lot of it had to do with his home connection to the net. Small enough connection, the server won't go down, but the connection will be maxed out. But then again if you look at http://www.pingdom.com/reports/1qmidp4d0jsb/check_ ... it shows over 4 hrs of down time, and that was just serving the HTML page with just 5 images on it. Or the comment on the website....
Update 2/9/08
Sorry about the downtime. NetBSD didn't like the Digg effect this time and paniced. Thanks for looking. - saltmiser, on 02/10/2008, -0/+5bsd = very yes
- RockinRoel, on 02/10/2008, -1/+6Why don't you use Lighttpd? I heard it's best at enduring high loads, while not asking too much of your machine.
- 4degrees, on 02/10/2008, -0/+5BSD. good to hear that it could hold up. would other hardware hold up just the same with the same system running? Im thinking sofware is to thank rather than the hardware.
- smek2, on 02/10/2008, -1/+5Somehow i get the feeling that, if this machine were running on Linux, these comments would be very different.
- Siraf, on 02/10/2008, -0/+4Well my webserver is run using an old-punch card based system. We barely got it turing-complete. So take that!
- Gogogo111, on 02/10/2008, -0/+4K, Huckabee.
- Turr, on 02/10/2008, -1/+5omg 25mhz!
- Taquoshi, on 02/10/2008, -1/+5Uh, our museum has a IIci that is still running on a daily basis and works just fine. I must say, we are planning on dis-assembling the machine in the near future for other reasons, but there haven't been any operating problems.
- celkin, on 02/10/2008, -1/+4A Mac IS a PC!!!
- celkin, on 02/10/2008, -1/+4LOL WUT
- celkin, on 02/10/2008, -0/+3Is it a coincidence that Unix was invented in the 60's?
- zxcvbnm114, on 02/10/2008, -1/+4The really remarkable think is a 1989 computer can support 128mb of ram. That is ahead of its time. Typically people then would have been running dos on 1-4mb of ram.
- canthraxp, on 02/10/2008, -2/+5...said the guy with an apple logo as his avatar.
And yeah, there's plenty of luck involved in digg. If your story hits the page on a peak traffic hour, lit some candles and pray for your dying server. - Nougat, on 02/10/2008, -0/+3Is that the one you found at the garage sale with AOL inside it?
- TheWindBlows, on 02/10/2008, -0/+3nowadays we got that type of memory already attached to the CPU :P.
- spinchange, on 02/10/2008, -4/+7It's also serving this: http://littledork.err0neous.org/media/ayb2.swf
- pitlord, on 02/10/2008, -0/+3Actually, Apple was selling server products back in the 90's. They even had their own suite of network applications to handle email, software distribution, python development, relational database server, web server, print server. In many cases there were two or three options from various vendors.
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