Mac Mini Vault, a colocation service that allows you to host a website (or multiple ones) on a Mac Mini or Mac Mini Server located in their Chicago data center, is running an interesting experiment to see how a single webpage hosted on an Apple TV 2nd-gen would handle traffic and CPU load. The Apple TV isn’t of course meant for hosting webpages and running on high CPU usage, and in fact the device (with iOS 4.2.2) had to be jailbroken using Seas0npass to enable the installation of lighttpd and a web server.
One of the fun projects going on at Mac Mini Vault is our Apple TV webserver. As much as we ‘d love to see how many Apple TV’s we could mount into a data center cabinet, it will never be a sustainable service to offer. This project was a fun way to see how far we could take the A4 powered Apple TV. The Apple TV is running iOS 4.2.2 (obviously jailbroken) with lighttpd for a web server. You can see the webpage we set up by visiting atv.macminivault.com. We’ll keep an eye on the CPU load and watch the analytics to record how much traffic the Apple TV receives.
The Apple TV-powered webpage is available at atv.macminivault.com, and it’ll be interesting to see how the experiment will play out once curious readers hit the direct link.
