[COFF] [TUHS] Re: the wheel of reincarnation goes sideways

[Dan Cross]

On Mon, Mar 13, 2023 at 6:34 PM Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 13, 2023 at 6:16 PM Peter Pentchev <roam at ringlet.net> wrote:
> > On Wed, Mar 08, 2023 at 02:52:43PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
> > > [bumping to COFF]
> > >
> > > On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 2:05 PM ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > The wheel of reincarnation discussion got me to thinking:
> > [snip]
> > > > The evolution of platforms like laptops to becoming full distributed systems continues.
> > > > The wheel of reincarnation spins counter clockwise -- or sideways?
> > >
> > > About a year ago, I ran across an email written a decade or more prior
> > > on some mainframe mailing list where someone wrote something like,
> > > "wow! It just occurred to me that my Athlon machine is faster than the
> > > ES/3090-600J I used in 1989!" Some guy responded angrily, rising to
> > > the wounded honor of IBM, raving about how preposterous this was
> > > because the mainframe could handle a thousand users logged in at one
> > > time and there's no way this Linux box could ever do that.
> > [snip]
> > > For that matter, a
> > > thousand users probably _could_ telnet into the Athlon system. With
> > > telnet in line mode, it'd probably even be decently responsive.
> >
> > sdf.org (formerly sdf.lonestar.org) comes to mind...
>
> I don't know if a thousand users ever logged in there at one time, but
> they do tend to have a lot of simultaneous logins.

I thought some folks here might find this interesting.  Someone else
today reminded me of tilde.town, which is a publicly accessible
machine running Linux. They have a shocking amount of use:

tilde% hostname
tilde.town
tilde% uname -a
Linux tilde.town 5.15.0-58-generic #64-Ubuntu SMP Thu Jan 5 11:43:13
UTC 2023 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
tilde% uptime
 21:38:01 up 156 days, 17:15, 454 users,  load average: 3.82, 4.40, 4.19
tilde%

Not quite a thousand users logged in simultaneously, but half that. If
one counts the number of processes associated with pseudoterminals,
it's more (I guess a lot of users are running tmux and/or screen).

The system is also surprisingly modest: 6 cores, 16GiB of RAM and
about 1TB of storage.

It's surprisingly zippy.

        - Dan C.