At 1:16 PM -0400 6/28/96, Brock Rozen wrote:
>Memory is cheap, agreed. BUT, if you have one million users (yes yes, not
>all use their maximum) then adding memory to support them all becomes
>expensive. Also, don't forget the added tech support, replacement of
>equipment, etc etc. Buying a few gigs doesn't cost much, but then they
>would need more than a few gigs for such a userbase.
Actually, it's been our experience that it's cheaper for us to
buy hundreds of GB of disk space than it is to expect the users to
buy comparable disk space for installation on their various local
machines (as capacity goes up, the cost per MB goes down). Of
course, we can't spend infinite amounts of money to permanently solve
this problem for the entire Internet, but lots of disk space is
significantly cheaper if you can buy in bulk.
But, we have to draw the line somewhere. And wherever you draw
that line, it will be largely arbitrary. As the maximum size goes
up, the number of users who bump into that limit gets asymptotically
small, but they're still there. And if you're still growing very
quickly (I won't say exponentially), then this number of users
quickly bumps right back up to where it was when you last boosted the
limit. Thus, reinforcing the point that any kind of limit is, by
necessity, an arbitrary one.
--
Brad Knowles, MIME/PGP: brad@his.com
comp.mail.sendmail FAQ Maintainer <http://www.his.com/~brad/>
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