Subject: Re: NetBSD toaster on slashdot.org (was Re: NetBSD toaster at theinquirer.co.uk)
To: Julian Suschlik <julian.suschlik@gmail.com>
From: Jesse Off <joff@embeddedARM.com>
List: netbsd-advocacy
Date: 08/12/2005 17:06:51
> I'm curious how this board would perform running lighttpd
> http://www.lighttpd.net/ (in pkgsrc-wip:
> http://pkgsrc.netbsd.se/?cat=wip&pkg=467) which is better suited for
> low memory environments.
lighttpd looks interesting though we haven't tried it. Honestly, there is
very little need to seek out a more efficient web server than Apache 1.3 in
our particular case since CPU time or memory is not the bottleneck in the
greater picture by a long-shot.
> I'd love to test myself. Is your board available in Europe in small
> quantities (read: 1)?
Yes. Though they are shipped from the US (Arizona) and you have to pay
shipping costs.
Technologic Systems donated 2 TS-7200's several months ago to the NetBSD
foundation and I believe they ended up in the hands of two pkgsrc
developers. (Can't remember who, though one was in Europe and one was in
the US)
>
> It's time for a new ratio in benchmarking webservers: (hits/s)/Watt :)
I suspect a PC laptop would probably take first place. It has a higher
absolute power than devices like the TS-7200, but PC's are very very fast.
The TS-7200 actually wasn't designed for extremely-low power and rather was
designed for low cost. We could have put switching regulators on the 3.3V
and 1.8V supplies and used some parts with a lower static current. Current
would almost be cut in half but price would have been $20 more. Power would
be nominally <1 watt rather than 2 watts which is great, but only something
that would be really appreciated by customers running on solar power or
batteries. The TS-7200 CPU has software controlled PLLs which can be
configured to run the chip in the kHz and run on practically 0-power, but
then you hardly have enough CPU to run the timer interrupt.
//Jesse Off