Re: maximum possible memory limit ..

From: Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu
Date: Thu Apr 24 2003 - 13:35:59 EST


On Thu, 24 Apr 2003 20:05:24 +0200, Henti Smith <bain@tcsn.co.za> said:
> I had a discussion with somebody watching the whole M$ server launch and
> mentioned then new systems supports up to a terabyte of ram.

Well.. sure.. it's easy enough to write something that supports plugging in
a terabyte. The *tricky* part is supporting it well - you have page table
issues, you have swapping/thrashing issues (if you *do* have to page something
out, you're in trouble.. ;), you have process scheduling issues (how many
Apache processes does it take to use up a terabyte? What's your load average
at that point?), you have multi-processor scaling issues (you're gonna want
to have 64+ processors, etc..)

Consider - the number of machines with over a terabyte of RAM is limited:

http://www.llnl.gov/asci/platforms/platforms.html

That's the sort of box that has a terabyte. Do you *really* think that
M$ 2003 has all the stuff needed to scale to THAT size?



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