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I have a friend that years ago (Linux kernel 0.98 or such) put in several machines that just ran as network routers (before the prices came down). He felt crushed when after 3 years the customer moved physical locations and he had to bring down his nicely running server. This was before the days of advanced garbage collection schema's like we see in systems today. Java and other pseudo interpreted languages just bring memory management issues to a point. (One bank I worked for used a major Java based web application that required rebooting of 2 of their major servers twice a day due to Java memory issues. Not to pick on Java, but any application that acted like that should be tossed, IMHO. Oh yes, this was running IBM Websphere.) When I did IBM mainframes running VM/XA, they did a 'theraputic reboot' (IPL) every month as general system maintenance. It could go over a year, but had to be rebooted (at that time) whenever Daylight Savings Time changed :) ... Still IBMs VM/XA was a work horse for us. It did 'break' if more than about 2000 interactive users were on it simultaneously. But that was due to architectural issues in the virtual memory management, and each user ran their own separate operating system (normally CMS, but we also ran Amdahl's version of AT&T UNIX, and MVS, all at the same time of course :) .. and as far as 'raw speed', many gaming desktops could blow away the then 'big mainframes' computationally today, but they had IO speed and separate I/O processors (channels) that made a big difference in I/O capabilities. Memories are good. ... I still try to forget the 72 hour mainframe moves to move thousands of users across the country back when a T1 was 'fast networking', at least for distances. Even in-house channel to channel communication was limited to 3 mega bytes per second per channel (Now they have faster channel processors). And that was the same speed to or from disk drives, or network processors. ... Memories. ... Now back to our daily discussion :)
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