Re: Cacheoff results published.

Hans Reiser wrote:
>
> Joe Cooper wrote:
> >
> > Hey folks,
> >
> > The cacheoff results have been published.
> >
> > http://www.measurement-factory.com/results/public/cacheoff/N03/
>
> We did worse than Microsoft..... but we did well for just a few months on the optimization task.
> Time for the deep rewrite.

As I understand it, Microsoft's offering was the result of a ~9 month
deep rewrite of Microsoft's proxy. I'm also given to understand that
the entire proxy coding team from Israel was at the cacheoff. It was
three people. Not bad for Microsoft. I guess this must be the third
incarnation of the Microsoft proxy, because that's usually how many
rewrites it takes them to get something right!

But Microsoft isn't, yet, our competition. Novell's ICS owns this
market. Only iMimic has managed to make a very small dent in that.
 
> What is the scoop with the stratacache dart having its price/performance results excluded?

Chris at OCD worked out an extremely low license price for ICS (which is
normally $750+ at the lowest end) with a very restrictive user #
license. The Dart can only legally (and probably software limited)
support 10 simultaneous users. That's how he can sell an ICS box for
~$700 (I don't know how he can afford to _support_ a box that cheap,
I'll have to ask him next time I talk to him).

However, with that license issue, the usefulness of being able to serve
120 reqs/sec is highly suspect. Therefore, Alex and Duane (and I
suppose a general agreement among vendors) decided to exclude it from
the price/performance running...the low price would have sent it through
the roof on the price/performance chart. As much I respect Chris'
desire to tackle the low end market with a high performance and low cost
box, I have to agree that it isn't useful to compare price/performance
of a 10 user limited box against boxes that are unlimited in their
license. Even our much lower end boxes can support far more than ten
users (in the hundreds for even our lowest priced box).

Nonetheless...Let's all think about what that tells us about our goals
for Squid. The Dart with a P200 (not PII, not Celeron..a Pentium MMX)
with a single 5400 RPM disk and 128MB of RAM outperformed our box by a
very small margin. Our box was a Thunderbird 800, with 3 7200 RPM
disks, and 512MB of RAM. We couldn't handle more than 30 reqs/sec on
hardware that size. We've got our work cut out for us, eh?

The ICS coding group have done some pretty impressive things. Though
everyone who has tried the iMimic stuff is under NDA, I did to hear from
some folks in the know that iMimic really isn't very much faster (~10%)
on equal hardware than ICS at this stage. The first cacheoff results
were skewed somewhat due to the lower price of their hardware (it was
underpriced compared to what they sell now). This cacheoff indicated
that fact pretty clearly by the results of their OEMs (f5 and Cintel).

Questions, comments, always welcome.
                                  --
                     Joe Cooper <joe@swelltech.com>
                 Affordable Web Caching Proxy Appliances
                        http://www.swelltech.com
Received on Thu Oct 12 2000 - 03:28:21 MDT