Those Cruel Irish

People inside Sun were gleefully emailing around Colm MacCárthaigh’s big Niagara benchmark post and I was reading and found myself laughing out loud. The synopsis is: it’s a big serious benchmark and the box did great, pretty well slaughtering both a Dell Xeon and a Dell Itanium. But jeepers, those Irish dudes are heartless, I’m surprised there weren’t smoking shards of casing and silicon on the floor. I think most Apache & *n*x geeks would find themselves gasping and snickering a bit at Colm’s write-up, but there’s some real wisdom there too about filesystem and server tuning and so on, although some of the tricks are definitely don’t-try-this-at-home. Anyhow, here are some cute samples:
“Also, in each case, the system was pretty much unusable by the time we were done!”
“... about 83,000 concurrent downloads.”
[They managed to crash Solaris with the experimental event MPM]: “Then again, it was handling about 30,000 requests at the time, with no accept mutex.”
“Of course, no server should ever be allowed to get into that kind of insane territory.”
“Note: these are stupid values for a real-world server... really only useful if you are doing some insane benchmarking and testing.”
“...5718 requests per second.”
Hey Jonathan, let ’em keep the box. [Update: They’re keeping it.]