Comment by grey-area | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grey-area | Hacker News Reader

According to the linode FAQ [1], current linode servers have roughly 20GB of RAM shared out. Does anyone know the spec of the new servers and what the max memory would be? The max for the CPU seems to be 750GB [2]. Presumably servers would be far less than the theoretical max, but fingers crossed they'll be able to bump the memory at some point soon so that they're a bit more competitive with others.

I was really hoping that was going to be this announcement, however the fact they've titled it 'The Hardware' hints that there might be nothing new on RAM in the next announcement, which would be a shame. Upgrades to CPU are nice, but it'd be nicer to see a RAM upgrade, as almost everyone is constrained on RAM rather than CPU or disk, particularly on newer hardware and with their new bandwidth limits.

I feel rather ungrateful now having said all that. Thanks anyway Linode!

[1] http://www.linode.com/faq.cfm#how-many-linodes-share-a-host [2] http://ark.intel.com/products/64595/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-...

Same here but I'm still holding out hope. I recently wrote a blog post comparing my experiences with both Digital Ocean and Linode and both companies ended up commenting on it. Linode hinted that there'd be a few changes coming soon that'd please me. Considering I mentioned RAM and pricing I want to believe they were hinting that they really were planning on bumping up the RAM for current customers. They didn't say anything we haven't heard them state publicly before but even so, I'm still holding out hope. I think more RAM is probably the number one request and they'd have to be living under a rock not to know it. So I'm hoping that maybe they're playing it close to the chest for now until all the other upgrades are complete and then maybe they'll increase our RAM when it's all over. Who knows. We can always dream.

Just seen this link to a pic on twitter lower down in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5396634

Not sure where that pic is from or whether it is legit, but if they double the RAM on all plans as it implies I'll be really pleased... there's some intriguing text top right too which looks like it might be some sort of stats monitoring system (longview?).

I can "confirm" that double the ram is coming, they were handing out flyers at SXSW stating as such. Here is a photo I took in high resolution: http://code.mglinski.com/X3ps/30zoh6Yf Of course it is all still plans, but after talking with them directly about it I feel very confident they will be doing your ram junkies sweet justice once they have had the chance to move everyone over to the new E5 boxes.

They had a demo of Longview on the show floor too, from what I gathered it is a package install based daemon to monitor processes and the like, something like the server part of NewRelic but sitting directly in their datacenters.

That's good news! They're just stringing the announcements out for more publicity. Thanks for the better pic.

Most dual E5 motherboards have 16-24 DIMM slots, 32GB DIMMS exist but are insanely expensive and big, most likely they would use 16GB DIMMS so they probably have 256-384GB of ram per box. They could in theory be using some custom motherboard shenanigans to increase the capacity, but that is unlikely.

Keep in mind that the CPU's they mentioned are ~$1600 each in lots of 1, I'm sure they are getting a good discount for volume but that is still a lot of $ per box in CPUs, I would imagine they need to pack them full of VMs to offset their costs.

FWIW there was a big RAM increase some years ago: http://blog.linode.com/2010/06/16/linode-turns-7-big-ram-inc...

Taking Linode's past behavior (history of reinvesting profits into upgrading hardware/infrastructure and passing that value over to the customer rather than just milking higher margins), I'd expect them to someday upgrade RAM when it becomes economically feasible.

ram is the only thing you can't share, and hence, the only thing that makes shared hosting providers any money.

It's not impossible:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/KSM

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