

This is what a 5MB hard drives  looked like in 1956 (note: required a forklift) - sathishmanohar
http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2011/12/26/this-is-what-a-5mb-hard-drive-looked-like-is-1956-required-a-forklift/

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getsat
Mirror (since their server is exploding): <http://i.imgur.com/T2PnM.png>

"In September 1956 IBM launched the 305 RAMAC, the first ‘SUPER’ computer with
a hard disk drive (HDD). The HDD weighed over a ton and stored 5 MB of data."

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zeedotme
not sure what's happening but we're looking into it. We definitely haven't got
extraordinarily high traffic atm.

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getsat
Are you running preforked/threaded Apache? That's usually the culprit on WP-
powered sites. I'd check the Server header but recv() is failing now. ;)

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seanp2k2
Can you explain how running any other httpd that runs PHP via FastCGI or CGI
would be any better? The problem is that they're dynamic pages. The solution
is to statically cache the page in question. Since WP has this block in the
default .htaccess:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

if you just SSH in to the server, cd over to the HTML root, wget the page in
question and save the file as the name of the path, it'll statically cache it
and instantly alleviate ~95% of the work needed to serve the page.

Dynamic pages are the culprit in /any/ dynamic CMS, and caching is the
solution. You could use Varnish, or write/find a memcached plugin, or use
redis or whatever other key/value store is trendy at the moment...it's all
caching and it's the best way to make dynamic sites fast (besides Cloudflare,
which is just "magical" black-box caching)

Edit: TL;DR using nginx or lighttpd or cherokee or webrick or whatever other
httpd happens to be trendy this week won't help that much. Properly
configuring a caching system will help an order of magnitude more.

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sneak
There is a WordPress plugin entitled 'W3 Total Cache' which is a drop-in
solution for this problem. No wgetting required.

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MichaelApproved
I like reading stories about how careful programmers had to be when writing
code so the use of every bit was maximized. Unfortunately, this also lead to
the Y2K debacle.

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pan69
Which wasn't really much of a debacle after all...

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fosk
When in 2050 people will see how big a 1TB HDD is now they'll smile at it. I
love progress.

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ars
I'm not so sure about that. The 3.5 inch form factor has been around for more
than 30 years, and I don't see it going away anytime soon because it's a
"human" size (about the size of a hand). People are not getting smaller.

We'll fit a lot of more data onto them, sure. But the physical size of the
largest/most common hard disk available at that time is unlikely to change
much.

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ajaimk
I'd say the transition will happen away from spinning disks by then. Pretty
soon, Physics is going to start getting in the way...

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blhack
Physics is already getting in the way.

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jdpage
Physics always gets in the way of everything.

