Via has recently come out with ultra-tiny form factor motherboard.  I managed to get a hold of one of these, and have built the smallest (and most energy efficient) webserver running Joomla 1.5.1.  (It's not the smallest webserver...  There's one that's a single IC).  The whole thing, powersupply and all, is smaller than a 3.5" hard drive (infact, I use an old IDE drive caddy to hold it).  Peak power draw is a mere 15 watts.  I'm preparing a complete writeup on this thing, but I thought I'd throw a little teaser at you...

Specs

Motherboard: Via PX-10000G

• Processor: 1 GHZ C7 CPU
• Lan: 100 mbit
• Size: 10cm x 7.2 cm ( 3.93in x 2.83in)
• Power Draw: 12 Watt peak

Ram: 512 Meg DDR2 566 SODIMM

Hard Drive: Emphase 2GB IDE flash drive

Powersupply: 60 Watt peak DC-DC

Operating System: GRML

Putting It All Together

Well, after asemballing it all, I tossed it inside of a caddy (well, mounted everything properly).  Here's a closeup of the layout:

And Just To Prove The Size:

What Can It Do?

Well, the numbers are far from final, but it can run joomla 1.5 on its own.  Generation time is around 1 second per page.  But, that appears to be the fastest it can go.  It serves 1.5.1 at about 1 request per second (Keep in mind that a dual xeon was only capable of 6 req/sec without caching).  The real shocker was with static files.  I was able to pump out 4,500 requests per second AT whatever concurancy I could throw at it (up to 1000).  Compare that to the dual xeon which peaked at around 10,000 requests per second, but started to fall off above concurancy levels of aournd 250 or so. 

With some proper tweaking, imagine what it's capable of (on 15 watts, versus 300 for the dual xeon server)...  So keep an eye out...

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