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