On 7 March 2010 19:05, Jonathan Ellis <jbel...@gmail.com> wrote: > Yes, but I would guess 90% of workloads are better served with > spending the extra money on more machines w/ cheap sata disks and lots > of ram. >
I'm not an expert, but I imagine that in many cases, capex is not the limiting factor. In data centres, power appears to be the main limitations - modern x86 servers use so much power that many older data centres cannot be stocked at very high density (because the don't have enough cooling for that much heat). So the number of boxes you can put in is directly affected by the amount of power they use. For this reason, the most efficient way is to find the ideal combination of CPU, memory and disc to do what you want with the least power. I guess ram is pretty cheap on power - I mean, it uses hardly any. Mark
