Posted Mar 10, 2011 21:49 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
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It's the trademark dry Corbet wit.
Delaying the OOM killer
Posted Mar 11, 2011 17:53 UTC (Fri) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246)
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I'm sure it must be rough for Google, with their rack of aging 386SX's populated almost entirely of SIMMs ganked from retired LaserJets from the local Uni.
;-)
Delaying the OOM killer
Posted Mar 12, 2011 18:15 UTC (Sat) by Per_Bothner (subscriber, #7375)
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It's the trademark dry Corbet wit.
Imagine 100 years from now somebody updating the HyperPedia article on Google, to note that Google ran on a small number of machines, and using this sentence as a reference.
History could be re-written because of careless sarcasm.
Delaying the OOM killer
Posted Mar 13, 2011 4:23 UTC (Sun) by dmag (subscriber, #17775)
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> Imagine 100 years from now [..] using this sentence as a reference.
Riiight. A future in which LWN is the only known text of this time? And just this page so future historians don't notice his penchant for witty comments like this?
Besides, Google hasn't even hit 10M machines yet, so I think Corbet is spot on.
Delaying the OOM killer
Posted Mar 13, 2011 5:39 UTC (Sun) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359)
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Agreed.
Further, it is widely reported that google go to some efforts to squeeze as much work as they possibly can out of the computers that they do have, which is the real point of background to this article.
So it certainly appears that they do not have spare computing resources.. is that the same as "not many computers" - It's hard to say. Many is a relative term:
I do have many computers at home - 7 or 8.
Google doesn't have many computers in their data centers - less than 10 million.
Delaying the OOM killer
Posted Mar 14, 2011 13:14 UTC (Mon) by alextingle (guest, #20593)
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*fewer* than 10 million.
;-)
Delaying the OOM killer
Posted Mar 14, 2011 13:43 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
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The future historians would also have to be unaware of the existence of Google, its size, and probably also of the existence of sarcasm. Given that we can spot sarcasm in the works of Chaucer and in Beowulf, I'd say that these future historians are remarkably implausible.