Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Performance Showdown - SSDs vs. HDDs

Very interesting data posted on slashdot:

"Computerworld compared four disks, two popular solid state drives and two Seagate mechanical drives, for read/write performance, bootup speed, CPU utilization and other metrics. The question asked by the reviewer is whether it's worth spending an additional $550 for a SSD in your PC/laptop or to plunk down the extra $1,300 for an SSD-equipped MacBook Air? The answer is a resounding No.

Surprising performance results

“I used HD Tach to test the drives' performance -- and got some interesting results. It was the mechanical Momentus drive (non-SSD) that scored the highest burst speed at 214.3MB/sec. The Crucial SSD came in second at 137.3MB/sec., but the desktop Barracuda (non-SSD) and its 135MB/sec. clung to its heels. Advanced Media's Ridata drive trailed the pack at a leisurely 71.2MB/sec. While the two mechanical drives and the Ridata SSD posted average reads in the 54MB-to-55MB/sec. range, Crucial forged ahead at 120.7MB/sec.

SSDs are highly praised for their boot speed, so I would have been remiss had I relied solely on a standardized test. The results were a bit surprising. Crucial's SSD and the two Seagate devices all required 39 to 40 seconds to cold boot to the desktop. (There are a few minutes of behind-the-scenes activity during a Vista boot, but I determined that the boot was complete once the Windows sidebar appeared.) Ridata did best of them all, with a boot time of 32.1 seconds, although that's hardly the blazing speed you might expect from an electronic versus a mechanical device.”

Moving data

“Finally, because these SSDs have a comparatively small capacity, it's most likely that you will be transferring data from your laptop after a day's work. So I took 4,666 files and folders (a total of 8.05GB) and copied them to the drives and then copied them from those drives. I used the same secondary drive as source and destination in all cases.

Neither of the SSDs fared very well when having data copied to them. Crucial needed 243 seconds and Ridata took 264.5 seconds. That's over four minutes. The Momentus and Barracuda hard drives shaved nearly a full minute from those times at 185 seconds. In the other direction, copying the data from the drives, Crucial sprinted ahead at 130.7 seconds, but the mechanical Momentus drive wasn't far behind at 144.7 seconds. Ridata and the Barracuda were third and fourth at 156.8 and 166 seconds, respectively.”


More details here.

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Sunday, April 27, 2008

FaceBook server infrastructure

Om Malik reported on Gigaom.com:
The company is running around 10,000 servers, according to Data Center Knowledge, citing comments made by Facebook VP of technology, Jeff Rothschild, at a recent MySQL user conference. (See video of the panel.) Of the 10,000 servers, 1,800 are from MySQL and around 805 of them are memcached servers. In order to house its sprawling infrastructure, Facebook has leased data center space from DuPont Fabros in Ashburn, Va., and Digital Realty Trust in Santa Clara, Calif., DCK reports.

How much is Facebook spending on its infrastructure? The company isn’t going to tell us, but there are clues. Server and storage company Rackable today reported first-quarter 2008 sales of around $69 million. Facebook is one of its largest customers, accounting for around 10 percent of Rackable’s sales (that number could be higher, but we’ll have to wait for Rackable’s 10-Q to get a clearer picture), so some quick, back-of-the-envelope math reveals $7 million in spending by the social networking company. A well placed source of mine just let me know that Facebook is going to spend over $9 million more on servers this year. That should be good news for Rackable. Next on my list is an estimate of Facebook’s bandwidth and data center costs.

Doing a little more calculation - $7M for 10,000 servers, means about $700 per server, assuming a 10% cost for F5,firewall etc. - we are at $630 per server. That's pretty heavy duty server, I think.

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Thursday, April 03, 2008

Komli to represent eBay India for all their ad sales worldwide

Komli and eBay India have entered into an exclusive partnership whereby Komli will represent eBay India for all their ad sales worldwide. In addition, Komli's ad network optimization technology PubMatic will optimize eBay's unsold ad space for maximization of revenue.

This is very exciting news for a couple of reasons:
1. A global internet giant has chosen to partner with an Indian startup for its superior understanding of online advertising and online advertising technology,
2. This bodes well for the growth of online advertising in India -- large portals, which in the past have not looked at online advertising as a key revenue driver, are starting to do that now.

For details see official news release at - http://www.komli.com/news/ebaypress.php .

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