Forum OpenACS Development: Re: OpenACS Performance Tests

PS: with upcoming processors like POWER7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER7 or Rock http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_(processor), we will get 32 simultaneous threads (SMT) per chip! Linux will see this as 32 processors. Cool machines for running OpenACS and PostgreSQL.

i don't see these options as alternatives, but as directions. It is bad if one has multiple cores in a machine is not able to use it. The basic OpenACS infrastructure was built for multiple processing units. The point is simply: the micro-processor designers stopped a few years ago to increase frequencies and to add cores and SMT. These chips arrive now, Aolserver and OpenACS are ready to use them - NOW.

It would be certainly an interesting project to build something like OpenACS based on a P2P-network and DHTs (cassandra, bigtable, ... coral, cfs, oceanstore .... pier), but this will be a different project, since some basic assumption about the data storage are different.

The costs of processor per machine went down over the last yeas dramatically. ten years ago, a dual processor machine had the cost of a mainframe (i remember alta-vista vs. google discussions). today, a quadcore processor cost a few hundert dollar. i would expect a similar price for 32 cores in a few years from now.

Sure, DHT is just the basic workhorse, most of the other examples have also quite different properties than e.g. cassandra. What is the problem with the term "project"? xotcl-core and xowiki went out to be compatible with the acs data model. There is nothing wrong in having a project developing an acs package based on p2p technology. Many people will appreciate it. From the scope of the work, it is a project.

Furthermore, different file systems have different properties but that does not make them ACID-compliant databases.

Now, an interesting argument would be the one that makes the case for the use of ACID properties for content-oriented applications and semi-structured data.