Anyone else think it's about time to beat a WEB server to death?

[Michael Smith]

Jordan K. Hubbard stands accused of saying:
> However, I check myself with the knowledge that it's not an entirely
> unreasonable thing to want to know, and I merely wish that I had more
> data on this subject to provide in response.  It's obviously
> impossible to come up with one number that fits all situations, but
> various guesstimates can be derived from existing data so that given a
> link speed of x, a PC of macho-factor y and the "average" user doing
> z, you can come up with a performance projection of n users.
> 
> The only problem is that I don't *have* any existing data worth
> mentioning.

Brian Tao's benchmarks (700K+ hits per day) are a good opener when 
talking to commercial vendors that think that 10K/hour is "heavy".
A little while ago we had someone here with a problem where they
were peaking at 100/sec but falling off to 70/sec until update ran.
I haven't heard any more since then on that one.

I realise that neither of these are 'real-world' cases.

> If we can't get any actual data from existing WEB service providers,
> or even if we can, might I prevail on someone out there with a
> well-connected box to possibly declare a "flag day", during which as
> many people on this list as possible (and anyone else they can find)
> aggressively attempts to beat the server to its knees while the server
> maintainers busily collect stats on the event?

Do a 'dry run' first 8)

-- 
]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer        msmith at atrad.adelaide.edu.au    [[
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