(fax) "Doing nothing?"

[Trevor Cordes]

On  3 Mar, Andrew wrote:
> Unfortunately, if you read Trevor's post again, he was talking about
> server costs for things that use *free software*. All of that MS,
> Oracle, Symmantec BS is what your costs will be, no doubt. Get rid of
> those by using free software, and BAM, you just got rid of a large chunk
> of it.

Right, and since it's Apple we're talking about, I seriously doubt they
are running on a MS platform!  That would be funny.  And Symantec
doesn't make Apple products, do they?  Does even Oracle run on Mac?

I'd guess they're using BSD servers (OS X or not) and UNIX-based
software.  As for a DB, who knows.  Even Oracle wouldn't be that
expensive if your server farm wasn't too big.  I bet the iTunes farm is
several orders of magnitude smaller than Google.  iTunes just isn't that
intensive

Hmm, 1 billion downloads in 3 years.  94608000 seconds in 3 years. Let's
guess 10 page hits a download?  10B page hits.  That's about 100 hits
per second.  That's peanuts.  A 10 machine cluster could easily handle
1000-100000 hits a second, enough for 100 or 1000 hits per download.  I
wouldn't be surprised if iTunes runs off one rack full of Opteron blades
at some colocation provider.