On Mon, 12 Jan 2004, Magnus Manske wrote:
Here's a crazy thought: Is there a way to make a
server identify itself
as a *harddrive* on the SCSI bus? If so, we could take a machine with
lots of RAM which does nothing else than holding most of the DB in cache
(cheaper and faster than Compact Flash:-) and occasionally write stuff
to its hard drives. Probably won't need much of a CPU, and maybe not
even SCSI drives, just cheap IDE ones, as all it does is caching.
Then, we could plug that thing into the "real" DB server, which just
sees a really fast HD.
Well, one can dream...
Wouldn't the "harddrive" server be equivalent to the local RAM cache, only
accessed via the SCSI bus? it seems to me that it would work in the same
fashion - retrieve articles from the DB, cache them in RAM, and send them
over the SCSI bus - exactly what the actual server is doing. You're just
adding the RAM caches together, one local, one over a SCSI bus. Double the
RAM on the primary server, and you're better off :) (I'm assuming that OS
and application RAM overhead are minimal, which is probably true on a 4GB+
machine).
Alfio