[87029] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Akamai server reliability
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com)
Tue Nov 29 05:31:57 2005
In-Reply-To: <438B4EF7.7090704@garlic.com>
To: nanog@merit.edu
From: Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com
Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2005 10:33:15 +0000
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
> I still have the original server that started garlic.com in production
> after 11+ years so I know servers can last a long time. I don't
> understand why Akamai failure rates are so high
Applications which cause the disk to thrash will wear out
disk drives much more quickly than non-thrashing applications.
When I still ran USENET news servers back before cyclic file
systems were used, I remember that their hard drives died frequently,
often after less than a year of service, but those drives were
thrashing 24 by 7. You can hear drives thrashing and feel it
by touching the case. It is caused by almost completely random
access resulting in almost constant head movement.
It is cost effective to just thrash cheap drives and
replace them when they die.
--Michael Dillon
