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> Does anyone think it's odd that an Acer laptop could write these files to disk faster than JSTOR could serve them? Why would that be odd? SATA = 3 Gbps throu
by yid 15y ago
> Does anyone think it's odd that an Acer laptop could write these files to disk faster than JSTOR could serve them?
Why would that be odd? SATA = 3 Gbps throughput with minimal overhead, Ethernet = 1 Gbps with lots of overhead (IP headers, Ethernet headers, HTTP headers)
- sp332 15y agoSATA = 3 Gbps throughput with minimal overhead USB HD's top out about 200Mbit/s. JSTOR's RAID arrays should be able to drown his laptop without breaking a sweat.
- eli 15y agoJSTOR isn't at MIT; it's an online service. He just needed an MIT IP address to be able to access it without paying.
- nostrademons 15y agoDid it specify that he was writing to local disk? If I did a stunt like this, I'd probably try to write to some cloud storage like Amazon S3. I'd bet that Amazon's servers can drown JSTOR's, particularly if there's a big pipe like MIT's in-between.
- sp332 15y agoYeah, it said he went in at least once to swap out the external disk. I assumed it was USB and not eSATA or something. Also, it's a lot easier to find the owner of a Amazon account (credit card) than a "ghost" laptop under a cardboard box in a closet.
- kragen 15y agoIt sounds like JSTOR's servers aren't really optimized for high article download rates, to the point that his one laptop accounted for a significant part of normal continental US load. They probably had some bottleneck in the system that they never noticed before — maybe their logging infrastructure was absurdly slow or something.