Daily Archives: 2005-02-28

Gigaram sucks?

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Hum. Ironic Design runs several machines. We’ve got seven servers for servicing AnteSpam, plus three or four others doing miscellaneous duties, like hosting this blog.

Anyway, having all this hardware that we pretty much keep going 24/7, and especially with the AnteSpam servers, which get driven hard (2 emails per second, which doesn’t sounds like a lot until you consider that means 20x that in various database lookups and inserts (for logging) plus, oh yeah, actually running SpamAssassin) means we have some fairly strong ideas about hardware.

Our current systems are all Opteron-based (though we’ve not made the jump to 64-bit mode yet) with Tyan. Our storage controllers are all 3ware and our drives are all WD Raptors–not, honestly, that I love WD, but I like the 10K performance.

And our ram is all Crucial. And, for the forseeable future, it will stay crucial, because so far our one experiment with another vendor, Gigaram, has really sucked. We’ve had two pieces of our very nice ECC ram fail–and one of them we tried in another machine, and it failed there, too.

Now I don’t want to make blanket assertions off of relatively little data, but I will note that it’s going to take a long time for us to consider going back to Gigaram, because we take our uptime pretty seriously, and they’ve had an adverse impact.

Heh.

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Brad DeLong goes to Chez Panisse, then has some fun with it:

“We went to Chez Panisse for lunch last week.”
“Ah! The rough life of a Berkeley professor.”
“The dish they were pushing was chicken-under-a-brick. But i told them my wife had made it just a couple of weeks ago.”
“Did you tell them that what I made was actually chicken-under-a-cast-iron-Le-Creuset-casserole weighted with three soup cans?”
“No.”
“That would have given them their opening. ‘Well, sir, be assured that at this restaurant, our chicken-under-a-brick is made with real bricks…’”
“Real bricks, made by hand by the artisan brickmakers of Sonoma County…”
“‘Sonoma County? You jest, sir! Alameda County. Those who lose big at the local Indian casinos must work off their debt by gathering dung and straw from Shattuck Avenue to hand-make adobe Mission bricks…’”

I cannot, honestly confirm or deny…

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Chet’s recollection of me screwing around with people who kept calling my number in error. It has a vague sense of familiarity, but, honestly, it might have been Patrick–simply taking reservations seemed a little subtle for me, I was much more the “beat the phone against the wall” sort of person at that point.

I’m much better now. Unless you’re a telephone solicitor. Or a wrong number calling me too early in the morning.