Re: New ad server system

From: Brad Jensen <brad_at_elstore.com>
Date: Tue 17 Oct 2000 10:52:55 -0500

ZAK POWER <zak_at_hackers-for-hire.com> WROTE:
> Right now it presents the NEOS info including all sorts
> of stuff, hundreds of pages, but it all needs to be
> condensed into "85% capacity" I think. Rather than
> think about bandwidth, load averages, disc I/O and
> those infinite other things...

It would seem to me that the real bottleneck is disk
IO. Perhaps you are already caching the ads in RAM,
but if not, why not load each gif or other format ad
into memory and keep it there.

If you have 2,000 currently running ads at 30K each, it
would only take 64K. Then run your database updates
into memory with periodic updating of disk.

Another option would be to use a big RAM drive, since
PCs are now supporting gigabytes of memory. However,
I'd think a straight memory cache of the image would be
faster. Perhaps a RAM drive for the database updates
and log files, and in-memory cache for the images. Or
write the log files to disk, but buffer up 64k or more
for each write.

It's been our experience in the past that buffering up
your own writes and reads can give orders of magnitude
improvement in performance for i-o bound applications.

I'm assuming in this that the image is not being cached
on intermediate servers.





Received on Tue Oct 17 2000 - 10:52:55 CDT