Instant chats and central servers

Wed May 9 21:27:16 UTC 2001


> >         Just try to get Ircd to perform reasonably on an NT4.0 or Win2K
> > server. Try
> >to get it to take advantage of a multiprocessor Solaris box. Ted Turner
> >wants a better solution than that. ;)

> < http://www.boredom.org/cnn/statement.html >

> i'm sure ted loved the day that conference room crashed during
> a president clinton and wolf blitzer interview. or how someone was able
> to pretend they were the president during the interview as well.

	A P2-266 with 64Mb of RAM, running NT4.0, a web server, and a chat server,
held 2,800 chat users and about 800 web connections at the same time. The
operators at CNN had never run a chat that large before and didn't quite
understand how to use all of the tools and features. Since then, they've
received additional training and have upgraded their hardware.

	One unfortunate thing about Windows NT 4.0 is that unless you tune it, it
sets a very low limit on the amount of memory that can be locked for I/O.
With only 64Mb, the amount of memory it allowed to be locked was way too low
for the number of concurrent TCP connections they were handling. Sadly, a
few NT4.0 drivers blue screen when they can't lock memory for I/O. FreeBSD
blows up almost as badly when it runs out of mbufs. We have never seen this
problem on Windows 2000. However, overall, I recommend using Linux or
Solaris, at least until FreeBSD's threading problems are resolved.

	DS