Re: Purchase Advice Needed
- From: Glen Walpert <gwalpert@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2007 22:29:10 GMT
On Mon, 18 Jun 2007 08:46:05 -0700, Ancient_Hacker <grg2@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Jun 18, 8:20 am, Glen Walpert <gwalp...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
All of the desktop machines
blue-screened within an hour, even before any temp cycle was started.
That was the end of the "make the servers cheaper" whining.
Consumer grade stuff is of course even worse.
This might have happened if they were cycling the line voltage up and
down.
No power cycling or supply voltage fluctuations were involved, just
carefully designed data sets that tested worst case conditions such as
toggling all but one bit on a bus in both directions for every bit on
every bus. These worst-case patterns occur infrequently in real life
and are therefore infrequently tested for except in high reliability
servers.
On the other side, I know places that have used cheap and discarded
PC's as servers with very good results, like one failure out of ten
servers per year.
This can work well if you don't ask too much from your servers, but
not so well if your servers are heavily loaded with high value
transactions. Buisnesses like eBay or Amazon would consider one in
ten failing per year to be dreadful, and with their heavy server
loading would never get anywhere near that level of reliability from
old PCs - or new PCs.
But the point I was trying to make is that most consumer grade
computers will fail with certain data patterns in a testable,
repeatable manner due to shortcuts in design which result in low cost.
The worst case patterns which cause failures occur infrequently enough
that most users will simply reboot and blame the crash on Microsoft,
never suspecting shoddy motherboard design for the crash.
.
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