Market forces will probably bring the price of hardware down in the next decade. Whether it is in a form that is useful for regular people/hobbyists is another question. If not, then hopefully the "cloud" starts to look a lot different.

Too many darn acronyms. This one wasn't too hard to figure out from context but I wish people would define acronyms before using them!

> ... according to Checkonchain's difficulty regression model

It's a guess based on oil costs (as a proxy for energy costs). Personally I think it is completely worthless.

One day I will probably see if I can still reproduce the original problem and be more methodical about it. More likely on list of things I might not ever get around to.

The hangs usually happened when I was stressing VFS (the computer was a samba server) along with other workloads. To trigger a hang manually I would read in large files (bigger than available ram) in parallel while running a game. I could get it to hang even with 128GB ram. I tweaked all the vfs settings (swappiness, etc...) to no avail. I tried with and without swap.

In the end it looked like memory was not getting reclaimed fast enough, like linux would wait too long to start reclaiming memory and some critical process would get stuck waiting for some memory. The system would hang for minutes or hours at a time only making the tiniest of progress between reclaims.

If I caught the problem early enough (just as everything started stuttering) I could trigger a reclaim manually by writing to '/sys/fs/cgroup/memory.reclaim' and the system would recover. I wonder if it was specific to btrfs or some specific workload pattern but I was never able to figure it out.

Edit: I see this was covered in other replies

This matches my memory of 56k dialup with the two BONGs.

And now I get to share my favorite AT command. M0 could mute the modem! M1 was quieter than the default. I will never understand why those weren't more common! Used like: ATM0DT