9 ms·
An old Macintosh IIci 25Mhz running Apache under NetBSD
- nsxwolf 12y agoStatic page performance appears very high.
- sliverstorm 12y ago... and it still loads faster than most of the web today.
- dubcanada 12y agoAll 986 bytes of it.
- owenversteeg 12y agoYou can do a lot with that many bytes you know :) http://minfwk.com http://minfwk.com is only 9 bytes more (I'm the creator)
- nodesocket 12y agoProof that web servers serve static content insanely fast and efficiently. Would be a smaller memory footprint using nginx. UPDATE: And it appears to have gone down. Foot in mouth!
- _delirium 12y agoA single page load with no AJAX roundtrips, and no client-side scripts running helps a lot. Was reminded of that when I clicked on a search result to a mailing list archive today that happened to be hosted at Google Groups (vs the usual Mailman-style archives), and it took something absurd like ~4-5 seconds to load.
- sliverstorm 12y agoBasically I see it as an example of how we spend performance on complexity and overall stay at a similar net level of performance.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- vidarh 12y agoIt's quite amusing that this seems interesting today. Apache works on really old, slow hardware quite well. E.g. here's Apache, MySQL and PHP for AmigaOS: http://www.amigaos.net/software/77/aamp-apache-mysql-php http://www.amigaos.net/software/77/aamp-apache-mysql-php My first job was an ISP I co-founded. In retrospect, the biggest mistake we did was over-investing in hardware, by buying two 120MHz Pentium servers when we could have gotten away with 486's and a leased Cisco access server or two. But those two 120MHz Pentium servers with 128MB a piece, between them served up dozens of corporate websites, handled 32 dialup connections (we had a horrific setup with Cyclades serial port multipliers wired up onto a large wooden board with US Robotics Sportster modems wall mounted - the Sportster were cheap consumer grade modems prone to overheating, so stacking them in any way was generally a bad idea), ran a NNTP server with 30,000 USENET groups, mail for all our customers, and shell access. We got 5-6 25Mhz or 33MHz 486's with 16MB RAM to use as X servers, and ran all the clients (Emacs, Netscape and a bunch of terminals was a typical session) on the two Pentiums.
- nacs 12y ago> We got 5-6 25Mhz or 33MHz 486's with 16MB RAM to use as X servers But did those have Turbo buttons? If so then you were clearly cheating.
- sebcat 12y agoIIRC, "Turbo" was actually the normal clock frequency. Not having turbo-button enabled was mostly for things like games where the game speed was tied to the number of CPU ticks instead of absolute time. Turbo button sounds better than "slow-down-my-PC button".
- nacs 12y agoYou are correct - I was just kidding about the Turbo button. I was actually going to add in a quip about the 486 "DX" with the math coprocessor (vs the SX which didn't have it) being cheating too initially.
- enneff 12y ago
- userbinator 12y agoIs this a "load test"? It's certainly handling it quite well! Performance of the CPU is ~9 Dhrystone MIPS - comparable to a 33MHz 386 (9.9 DMIPS). Serving static content is really not CPU-intensive; most of the computation would probably be in TCP/IP processing. I think this, and other examples of old hardware commonly thought to be too slow for anything but still doing something useful, shows that much of the software we use today is really vastly less efficient than what's theoretically possible. I.e. how to make use of limited computing power efficiently can be more important than how much of it there is. For comparison, here is a static site served by a machine with a 4MHz custom CPU: http://www.magic-1.org/ http://www.magic-1.org/ (more details at http://www.homebrewcpu.com/ http://www.homebrewcpu.com/ )
- adfm 12y agoThe Macintosh IIci came out in 1989. Pretty good for a 24 year old machine! I pull mine out every once in a while to remind myself that we haven't advanced that much in a quarter of a century.
- api 12y agoI had a Commodore 64 with GEOS as a kid. It always amazes me what you can do without umpteen gazillioplex levels of abstraction.
- vidarh 12y agoIncluding surfing the web: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/classics-rock/surf-the-web-on-your-commodore-64/ http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/classics-rock/surf-the-web-... And some people have run web servers on C64's too. Contiki OS runs on C64 and provides a full TCP/IP stack for the C64 as well as a simple browser: http://www.contiki-os.org/ http://www.contiki-os.org/ (This site will apparently create a customized image: http://contiki.cbm8bit.com/ http://contiki.cbm8bit.com/)
- boomlinde 12y agoThere used to be a quite persistent website hosted from a C64 running Contiki. The pages were probably cached in RAM, but I still like to imagine that a beige 1541 disk drive spun up every time someone made a request.
- nkozyra 12y agoOr one of those weird cassette systems that I vaguely remember struggling with.
- vidarh 12y agoThe thing preventing that is that the C64 "Datasette" couldn't trigger play/rewind/fast forward from software, so it'd require it to show a prompt to the operator for each file it needed to load... Someone should hack together an interface - the C64 has usable extra IO pins on the cartridge port that surely should be possible to hook up to them. From a very cursory look at a diagram, it might actually be possible (don't know about safe) to hook the input that normally comes from the play/rewind etc. switch straight to suitable pins on the user port (or you may fry something, but the C64 is remarkably resilient to crazy people like me soldering stuff straight onto the PCB without knowing quite what we're doing, or replacing IC's with "mostly the same but not 100% compatible chips" just to see what would happen... it's a wonder I never broken my C64's)
- rburhum 12y agoToo many of you trying to see it. My requests are timing out every single time :(
- jorgis 12y agoThey're still working on the Z80-based load balancer so they can bring up another server.
- rbanffy 12y agoThe first Unix machine I used had 2 megabytes of RAM and was connected to two dozen terminals serial. It ran on a 68020. It probably wouldn't be able to run Apache, but it ran all our accounting and managed production for a large-ish corrugated paper factory. A Mac IIci is ridiculously powerful in comparison.
- vidarh 12y agoA 68020 can run Apache just fine. A 68030 is only about 20% faster per cycle on a lot of stuff than a 68020. Of course, with two dozen terminals active, things does change a bit...
- whoopdedo 12y agoThe advantage the 68030 has is the PMMU. I don't think you can use virtual memory on a 68020. My first Linux machine was a IIsi, the little-brother to the IIci. But I had to put NetBSD on it because the Linux keyboard driver was broken.
- rbanffy 12y agoYou forgot about the memory. Also, I don't think that specific machine had TCP/IP networking support.
- zak_mc_kracken 12y agoThis thread is going to contain a lot people complaining that even though today's hardware is orders of magnitude more powerful than twenty years ago, our computers seem to be just as slow.
- thejosh 12y agoWell it is slow because programs have been built to use all of our processing power. Like flash.
- bane 12y agoWell, we got rid of flash and replaced it with Javascript and HTML5 and whatever, so your theory holds.
- thejosh 12y agoNot being snarky, but Youtube with HTML5 is so smooth now.
- Narishma 12y agoNot for everyone. In my case, I have to use browser extensions to force Youtube to use the Flash player because the HTML5 one doesn't do hardware accelerated playback for some reason and drains my laptop's battery like crazy (not to mention the fan noise).
- vidarh 12y agoUnnecessary abstractions and expensive context switches are my favourite pet peeves.
- bane 12y agoAnd we don't really seem to be doing all that much more with them computationally.
- flomo 12y agoI worked in a college lab full of Mac IIcis, and they felt ridiculously slow even back then. :) I think people's memories get funny and they forget that it took minutes to launch programs and you could even watch the windows redraw.
- Bud 12y agoIn 1997 or so, I was running Apache under NetBSD on an SE/30. Ran quite well and was very stable.
- mixmastamyk 12y agoInteresting! I ran my first webserver on a Mac IIci at work, circa '94. We didn't have a firewall and were right on the internet. I soon was able to apple? script up a page with a live QuickCam image, text-box, cgi-bin, and the speech synth and let my friends have at it! I received nothing but innuendo and sheep noises, but it was a blast. This was a year or so before I started administering the definitive Quake server on the corporate network, and dare I say... internet. Up to twenty players at a time, some on dialup. Ah the good ol' days, hehe. ;)