> I don't recall the details of their pricing. The colocation facility is at the old IBM Wappingers Falls, Myers Corners lab complex. There were several nice buildings, one with a lot of well done raised floor.

Cool.

> IIRC, they were getting revenue from having a fiber roughly down the Hudson River for the 70 miles or so to Wall Street.

Ooh, interesting. Very interesting. That means deliciously low latency from anything inside that building to the stock market. If they know what's good for them, they'll have slapped inflated prices on the pipes to Wall Street, and done reasonably pricing for everything else. Ideal-case scenario, this means they have lower pricing for stuff that doesn't need those lines.

> I don't plan to go for a $4000+ Xeon processor soon, but I wanted to understand what the value is and see what I was missing.

Most definitely.

> Or can get an eight core AMD processor at 4.0 GHz for about $160. And, say, an 18 core Xeon at 3.3 GHz for $4000.

> ...

> That's 1389%, and that's a biggie.

oooo.

I'd be interested to know the exact models you compared there, because GHz is never, ever an effective baseline measurement. How big is/are the on-die cache(s)? What chip architecture does it use? What are the memory timings? What's the system bus speed?

Let me give you a nice example.

I used to use a 2.66Ghz Pentium 4, back in the bad old days of Firefox 3 when Gecko was dog-slow and Chrome didn't exist.

I now use a laptop based on a 1.86GHz Pentium M. The chip is almost running downclocked at 800MHz to conserve energy and produce less heat (this laptop could almost cook eggs).

Guess what? In practice, this laptop is noticeably faster.

It wasn't until a little while ago that I learned why: the Pentium 4 was using 100MHz SDRAM. This laptop's memory pushes 2000MB/s. I'd need to pop a cover to check the clock speed and memory type but I suspect it's 667MHz DDR2.

I also eventually figured out the other main cause of my woes: the chipset that computer was based on had an issue that made all IDE accesses synchronous, where the WHOLE SYSTEM would halt when the disk was waiting for data. Remember the old days when popping in a CD would make the system freeze for a few seconds? This was like that, but at the atomic level, in terms of fetching individual bytes from the disk. Whenever I'd need to request data the entire system would lock up for the few milliseconds it would take for that request to complete. If something was issuing tons of requests, the system could be brought to its knees pretty easily.

In practice, this meant that requesting even just a few MB/s from the disk could make my mouse pointer laggy and move across the screen like a slideshow. I can run "updatedb" - a program that iterates over my entire disk to build a quick-access index - on this laptop and only slightly notice it running in the background, whereas on the old system I had to walk away while it ran because I couldn't even move the mouse pointer smoothly. On this laptop it completes in about 3-4 minutes at the most, for a 60GB disk; the desktop had an 80GB disk and IIRC it took upwards of 10-15 minutes.

Other people could give you much more relevant examples, but these are some of my own experiences that I can share, that demonstrate that it's also the RAM, motherboard chipset - all the components put together - that contribute to a system's overall effectiveness.

Granted, few motherboards have serious issues like I experienced, and since most systems aim for maximum performance the differences are reasonably minor in the grand scheme of things; enough for people to nitpick, but ultimately equivalent, especially with server boards.

> For my startup, the software for at least early production appears to be ready. Now I'm loading some initial data and generally, e.g., for my server farm, doing some planning.
Then I will do some testing, alpha, beta and possibly some revisions.
Then I will go live and go for publicity, users, ads, revenue, earnings, and growth.
The basic core applied math and software really should work as I intend.

Sounds awesome...

> The main question is, will lots of users like the site? If so, then the project should become a big thing.

Please add me to your list of potential alpha testers. I'd love to see what this is, but I'm not sure if I'm squarely in your target market; you say this is a Project X for everyone, and probability applied to search sounds like a very enticing field, but unless it's something as ubiquitous as Google (applies to literally the entire Web, has multi-exabyte cache of the entire Internet held in RAM) I'm not sure how frequently I'd use it. I love WolframAlpha, for example, and yet I've used less than 10 times, and that just to play with.

> From my software and server farm architecture and software timings, one 8 core AMD processor at 4.0 GHz should be able to support on average, 24 x 7, one new user a second.

The way you've worded that generates a lot of curiosity. What do you mean by "one new user a second"? O.o

> Then I should be able to get, ballpark, $207,360 dollars a month in revenue.

Okay that's definitely worth it. :D

> In that case, growth should be fast, and I should consider Xeon processors if they have some significant advantages.

They do. They definitely do, especially compared to the AMD you put next to it earlier.

> E.g., some builders offer two Xeon processors, 18 cores each, on a motherboard in a full tower case with lots of room for hard disks. So, that would be 36 cores, and four of the 8 core AMD processors would be 32 cores in four cases. Then, sure, for more, get some standard racks and put in servers designed for racks.

I would start with racks, unless you have standard cases just lying around, and can afford (financially) to be a bit inefficient to begin with. Datacenters are designed explicitly for rackmount servers, not tower cases; two immediate advantages that come to mind with racked servers are exponentially superior cooling and significantly higher computation density - and that last one will greatly impact your bottom line: tower cases are atrocious for packing lots of computational power into a small space, so you'll use more space at the datacenter, and likely get charged higher rent because of it.

> I have a lot of flexibility in how many processors and motherboards I use because the software and server farm architecture is highly scalable just via simple sharding.

That's good, you may need it in the future.

> The architecture has just five boxes, Web server, Web session state server, SQL Server, and two specialized servers full of applied math. Each of these five can run in their own server(s), or, for a good start, all five can run in one server.

Awesome.

I have to say, some of the people here have mentioned starting using AWS nodes. I have to say, this may well work out to be significantly cheaper (in terms of time and energy, not just money) to start out with than renting space in a datacenter.