I am well aware of how search engines work.

The index is the distilled essence of the net. However, numerous links have stated for years that the CONTENT not just the index exists in RAM. Your link does not refute that.

It is perfectly fine with me if what I understand is in error. I'd like to change it. But you must provide the information for me to do so.

This is a good read:

http://www.cs.rochester.edu/meetings/sosp2003/papers/p125-ghemawat.pdf

And a more basic read (re-cap):

http://features.techworld.com/storage/467/googles-storage-strategy/

And some more fun:

http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/labs.google.com/en/us/papers/bigtable-osdi06.pdf


Oddly, I can not find any definitive claims that Googles DOES store everything in RAM. Do you happen to have some links? Everything I find is rather vague on the details. Only mentioning recent cache files and indexes being stored in RAM.

__________________
1991 560 SEL / 185k miles
1992 750il / 17k miles - project car

Ah, this article may better explain things without dumbing things down or getting too technical:

http://highscalability.com/google-architecture

Currently there over 200 GFS clusters at Google. A cluster can have 1000 or even 5000 machines. Pools of tens of thousands of machines retrieve data from GFS clusters that run as large as 5 petabytes of storage. Aggregate read/write throughput can be as high as 40 gigabytes/second across the cluster.

__________________
1991 560 SEL / 185k miles
1992 750il / 17k miles - project car

I worked at Google for 2 years. They have a lot of hardware, but not nearly enough to store a backup copy of the entire Internet in RAM. The notion of even being able to store the entire internet in one place is fairly absurd, let alone in volatile memory.

-J

The mac has an intel processor so you can run Windows natively on it, or in a virtual machine (which is what I do). You could run MacOS inside a VM on a PC probably, and on some machines you can boot it natively.

I'm not going to claim they are perfect (I guess Steve didn't like the normal functions for the Home and End key?), but I like having Unix underneath the hood, and I find the OS lets me work on many things at once more easily. I find the hardware to be well designed and like the keyboard and long battery life. That said I also like Windows 7 and I still do a ton of work with XP / Server 2003 at my clients.

-J

__________________
1991 350SDL. 230,000 miles (new motor @ 150,000). Blown head gasket

Tesla Model 3. 205,000 miles. Been to 48 states!
Past: A fleet of VW TDIs.... including a V10,a Dieselgate Passat, and 2 ECOdiesels.
2014 Cadillac ELR
2013 Fiat 500E.

Story from 2008 - But the surprising fact is that they hold the entire internet in RAM memory. That’s what makes the process so lightning fast. Source

Posting from 2009 (cf diazona) - Google caches the entire internet in RAM. Source

Now I've been side-tracked the past 2.5 years (health, but am now recovering) so I have not been in touch with what's happened recently but I tend to stay current (except for Macs, smart-phones, social networking).

That article is just hearsay. Plus they had less hardware in 2008 which makes it even more absurd. They probably do keep a copy of the index in RAM for fast searches.

As part of my job I worked on these machines: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html

-J

Thanks for the info. It was a pretty common fable for a while.

I understand Mac uses some BSD code and can boot Windows. Someone earlier stated that it ran native windows in the Mac OS without virtualization. That was the only statement I could not grasp.

I currently run a 4 unit LAN using Win 7 and have 5 more PCs for sale. Not much room for another machine right now. If I get a chance to get my hands on a powerful Mac and can play with it I'd like to see what it can do.

Rocky Marciano could have beaten Muhammad Ali.

I think the poster was confused on semantics. Often emulation and virtualization are confused even though they are very different. On a Mac, like most machines, one can emulate or virtualize. And like on most machines, one can boot into a multitude of operating systems. At its core a Mac is like any other Windows box. But beyond the core foundations of the hardware is where the Mac becomes onto its own.

__________________
1991 560 SEL / 185k miles
1992 750il / 17k miles - project car

Wikipaedia is your friend. Emphasis is mine.


Mac OS X (pronounced /ˈmæk ˌoʊ ˌɛs ˈtɛn/)[7] is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, Mac OS X has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems. It is the successor to Mac OS 9, released in 1999, the final release of the "classic" Mac OS, which had been Apple's primary operating system since 1984.
Mac OS X, whose X is the Roman numeral for 10 and is a prominent part of its brand identity, is a Unix-based graphical operating system,[8] built on technologies developed at NeXT between the second half of the 1980s and Apple's purchase of the company in late 1996. From its sixth release, Mac OS X v10.5 "Leopard" and onward, every release of Mac OS X gained UNIX 03 certification while running on Intel processors.[3][4] Mac OS X - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I am curently running Snow Leopard and will switch to Lion after another 6 months or so. A pilot once told me"Never own the -A Model". Wise words.