BOSTON - Today was a fairly light day, with no training session scheduled. I attended a couple of the general technical sessions and a set of WIP (works-in-progress) presentations. Another Happy Hour with free (and good) beer. Unfortunately, the name of the benevolent sponsor escapes me...

The session on improving web server performance turned out to be useless to me. The paper detailed the research in modifying the behavior of accept() queuing for several small-name webservers, Knot, uServer, and Tux (the in-kernel webserver). There were pretty graphs of connections per second and many allusions made to how CNN supposedly melted on 9/11 under the load. If I remember correctly, and I can check my archives when I return home, I think that the robots.cnn.com server(s) held up throughout the morning and into the early afternoon of 9/11.

The thing these guys seem to miss is that you really can't run a production site, especially a news site, on crude applications like knot or Tux. While they may be able to scale massively to serve tons of one-packet-sized hits (their test load), they are just not feasible to use with modern dynamic sites and publishing methods. Something like AOLServer, which has proven to be massively scalable, can strike the balance between serving a flexible and useful daily news site and standing up to a 9/11-style onslaught. Even an optimized Apache could carry a lot of the static content load, yet still be useful beyond a 1500-byte html page.

I tread lightly and don't mean to insinuate that these guys don't understand the real world, as I am sure much of the computer science work like this may eventually have real-world application. Tons of intriguing and useful open-source applications come out of the world's universities, but being in the business has left me a bit cynical to theories, graphs, and half-baked niche applications. I guess this may be the same way that some people feel about the practicality of the US space program.

The lightning 5-minute WIP's were entertaining, at least, although a couple of the topics were even less practical than Tux and knot. One topic that caught my notice was the idea of eliminating unpredictability in web services.

How do we do that?

• software fuses (to control input)
• resource cops (to control runaway resource usage)
• output guards (to control the correctness of server output).

Since it was only a 5-minute talk, I was simply teased by the sub-topics and still need to dig more. The idea that we can build our services to fail gracefully and predictably intrigues me.

The website. Typing this off-line now, will have to verify the link and contents later.

And the winner for "Most Surprising Idea" award goes to the fellow who proposed, as a way to save heat and electricity in the data center, that server disk drives be directly replaced with laptop disk drives which are smaller and produce less heat. I'll leave counting the reasons why this would be bad, as an exercise for you, dear reader.

We do need to cut down on heat and power usage in large servers, I agree, but aren't laptop drives mostly 4200-5400rpm (1/3 or 1/2 of the speeds of server-class disks), IDE, and meant for shorter and gentler duty cycles than a 36GB 15Krpm SCSI drive? I'd think that increasing densities, which would allow us to just use less drives in general, would yield greater benefit, with less impact.

To be fair, 5 minutes is not much time and English is not the first language for some of these guys doing the WIP's. I'll be re-reading the proceedings on the train on Monday to dig into the technical session content.