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Perl CGl Programming: No experience required.
(Publisher: Sybex, Inc.)
Author(s): Erik Strom
ISBN: 0782121578
Publication Date: 11/01/97

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How Much Disk Space Is Enough?

Bill Gates of Microsoft was asked years ago how his company had become so successful. “Slick, tight code,” was the Boy Billionaire’s response.

Microsoft’s code may still be slick, but judging from its size, it’s not so tight any more. Nor is anyone else’s. Software, no matter what it does, seems to have grown in size at a rate commensurate with the power of computers over the past 15 years or so.

Naturally, you need enough disk space to handle the extra size of your programs and more, especially on your Web server. The three operating systems we’ve been discussing all have similar space requirements.

UNIX usually comes on a compact disc these days, but longtime UNIX system administrators will remember not-so-fondly when it took them an entire day just to make backup copies of the 40 or 50 floppy disks on which the operating system was shipped. UNIX has not gotten smaller since then; you will need a couple hundred megabytes of disk storage just for the OS and its associated files.

Windows 95 and NT can easily blow 200MB off of your disk drive, too, depending on how they’re configured.

When you take into account the operating system—no matter which one—and the software you’ll need to run your Web site, you’re looking at a vast expanse of software. You need an equally vast disk to hold it all.

Luckily, disk drive prices have dropped rather dramatically compared with what they were even a few years ago. It’s possible to purchase billions of bytes of storage for several hundred dollars.


NOTE:  Parkinson’s Law of Data, a kind of corollary to Moore’s Law, states that “Data expands to fit the space available for storage.” What this specifically means for disk storage is that, given a few hundred acres of disk space, you will soon find things with which to fill it to the brim. Remember how huge you thought your first 100MB disk was and how quickly you ran out of space on it? Keep this in mind before you decide to save money on a 1GB disk instead of going for two or three gigs.

Choosing an Operating System

Wars have flared over people’s religious differences. Operating systems can approach the same significance for some folks. Although there haven’t been any documented instances of weapons being drawn, a quick glance at the flame wars over various operating systems in the USENET newsgroups might indicate that shooting isn’t far from the contestants’ minds.

Your choice of an operating system for your Web site will be based on a couple of obvious criteria: cost and preference. But the choice should also take into account your temperament. You may prefer to have a Web site that pretty much runs itself, or you may be the under-the-hood type who likes to tinker and tweak. You can pick an OS that reflects these aspects of your personality—it’s not unlike shopping for shoes, you want to achieve a comfortable fit.

In the next section, we’ll take a neutral look at the three operating systems we have emphasized in this book.

Comparing the Big Three

UNIX, Windows 95, and NT are all stable and powerful enough to run a Web site. They have definite differences in look, feel, and functionality; they handle security issues in different ways; some software that runs on one won’t run on the others; and they range in price from free to hundreds of dollars.

But they will all do pretty much the same things as far as your Web site is concerned. Oh, you probably wouldn’t want to run that stock exchange we talked about earlier on Windows 95 because it lacks the security features of NT and UNIX. But that’s a rather extreme case.

The operating system is not only what runs the computer, it is the medium through which you run the computer. You need something that fits you and what you want to do with your Web site.

This overview of the Big Three will give you some idea of the characteristics of these operating systems so you can make intelligent choices.


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