[TriLUG] The thin line...

[Ryan Leathers]

Got me thinking... fairly off topic 

I didn't read that Andrew was talking expressly about web servers.  
Maybe he was instead talking about mainframes as packet switches /
routers.  Some of that went on in the early days, but it certainly
doesn't work that way any longer.  I don't think it was ever even the
norm.  In the mid 80's DARPANET was handing over networking
responsibilities to the NSF.  To that point, they had been using front
end processors to handle the network traffic chores rather than the
mainframe proper.  It wasn't until the NSF got involved that more
mainframes were added, and considerable growth occurred resulting in the
need to hold sizable routing information and process packets at such a
rate that the mainframe became interesting as a network infrastructure
component.  

By the late 80's, appliance routers were already showing up.  The famous
Cisco quote goes something like "People had a long history of buying
things that plugged into the wall, made noises and got warm."
So, the idea of an expensive mainframe as a network infrastructure
component was already on the way out once the software to handle routing
had been coupled with a cheap hardware platform.  





On Fri, 2006-10-06 at 00:54 -0700, Aaron S. Joyner wrote:
> Andrew Ball wrote:
> 
> > ...Also, over 90% of TCP traffic goes through mainframes...
> 
> I think it's reasonably safe to call the bluff on that statistic.  
> Probably well upwards of 30% of all TCP traffic is HTTP these days*, and 
> last time I checked Apache accounts for around 62.52% of all web 
> servers, Microsoft products another 30.13%, together around 93%**.  Just 
> from looking at the rough numbers there, even if I'm high balling the 
> HTTP numbers (probably not by much, if at all), then that's 25%+ that 
> isn't touching a main frame at all.  The traffic goes straight from a 
> client, likely through some appliance NAT router of theirs, into a cable 
> or DSL modem, through an access device at the other end onto Ethernet, 
> through a crap-load of routers, and eventually to a switch and some 
> random unix/ms server*** on the other end, and back again.  Another 
> interesting argument is that I've seen a lot of reports lately that p2p 
> traffic is consuming crazy percentages of all internet traffic these 
> days, some say as high as 60 to 75%.  I think those are exagerated 
> numbers, but I'd believe 40% or more.  I am not even aware of any p2p 
> apps for OS360, or anything even resembling a mainframe.  :)
> 
> Aaron S. Joyner
> 
> * - Alert: Conservative wild flaming guess.  Couldn't easily find any 
> trustworthy statistics here.
> ** - http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html
> *** - Don't even try the "these are virtual instances on z-series 
> mainframes" angle, no way there's any sizable percentage of websites on 
> such a platform, see Netcraft again.