Akamai server reliability

Michael.Dillon at btradianz.com Michael.Dillon at btradianz.com
Tue Nov 29 10:33:15 UTC 2005


> I still have the original server that started garlic.com in production 
> after 11+ years so I know servers can last a long time.  I don't 
> understand why Akamai failure rates are so high

Applications which cause the disk to thrash will wear out
disk drives much more quickly than non-thrashing applications.
When I still ran USENET news servers back before cyclic file 
systems were used, I remember that their hard drives died frequently,
often after less than a year of service, but those drives were 
thrashing 24 by 7. You can hear drives thrashing and feel it 
by touching the case. It is caused by almost completely random 
access resulting in almost constant head movement.

It is cost effective to just thrash cheap drives and
replace them when they die.

--Michael Dillon




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