ICO

but (this is hardly a stretch) perhaps that 'second hand' hard drive came from a PC that was nicked from the care home? If these people are as unscrupulous as they appear then it wouldn't be surprising if they were using stolen goods as cheap sources of parts...

Some more maths for you

working set used by the ZFS stuff was 15x greater

So do you think it's fair to say that IOPs/GB can scale by the same amount?

Or do you want to find another strange unit to measure things by?

Failfest

Hmm lots of fail in this comment as well - you should RTFA properly...

Your figures are based upon reverse osmosis providing ALL the water supplied to TW's customers - I don't think at any point the reporter suggested that Thames Water stop drawing water from aquifers and other reservoirs - conversely he suggested that doing so would cause flooding of tube tunnels due to raising of the water table.

Never mind that you have magically turned £40 into £50 for your 'killer bit'. Also did you happen to notice how much TW have spent stopping leaks, digging up roads etc. Scaling that back should comfortably cover the capex for this - and before you moan that leaks are wasteful, the infrastructure is over 100 years old and has been neglected - that's just how it is - and the cost of all that digging is being added to your bill, anyway...

The point of the article was to highlight that it would be possible to use desalinisation plants to make up for low rainfall. Don't you think that regions would benefit from not having to endure drought conditions, standpipes etc?

yes very small

I am yet to come across a Production system which constantly installs, removes and compiles software as its primary purpose.

I would suggest that the 'build server' which you describe is very much an edge case.

That one's Akamai. Shows up when an origin server is struggling under the load and doesn't respond quickly enough

PAEing the price

sure windows can do PAE from 2003 and up but then you have to pay M$ for the Enterprise version of the OS. :(

this even applies to the 2008 version which I wouldn't describe as ancient.

see post above

E.G. a 32-bit OS which will only support up to 3.5GB RAM (Windows, I'm looking at you) so can only have a tiddly disk cache. Never mind that the stupid OS (Windoze again) constantly tries to free RAM by swapping stuff to disk.

Stuff that on a server with >4GB of RAM and you are wasting it.

Virtualise it on a server with >4GB of RAM and even if there's some overhead the hypervisor can use all that extra RAM as a disk cache. Shimples.

good suggestion

zfs would have made this too easy and would have allowed the copy to run at almost network wire-speed (all block-level, you see). you could take a filesystem snapshot and send it over the wire (rsh,ssh) and import it at the other end. I have done this more times than I care to count with filesystems containing up to 30 million files. it also actually defragments the files in the process (currently pretty much the only way you can do that with ZFS)

of course you would have had to copy all the files from the NTFS filesystem to ZFS first though. :facepalm:

I have set up a system using Solaris 10, samba+winbind to store in excess of 100 million files in a multi-user Active Directory environment on ZFS. All kerberized and shared over the network. It even supports NFSv4 ACLs (requires patching samba a bit though).

I will be moving this from one server to another next week with a single command. Nice.