On Tue, Jan 13, 2004 at 03:06:29PM +0100, Gabriel Wicke wrote:
On Tue, 13 Jan 2004 05:46:15 -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
I'm putting the finishing touches on an order at Silicon Mechanics right now, and I'll report back to everyone once I have all the details and a firm delivery date promise.
Jimbo-
how much ram are you going to order for the Squids? I've read that it's possible to address more than 4Gigs though highmem on x86, but only 3 Gigs per process. Squid is a single-thread asynchronous app, so this is a limit. Is there a major price penalty in a single-processor 64bit CPU? Having enough ram for all content on the Squids is a good thing for both speed and reliability- not an immediate problem for now, but it might get one as wikipedia grows. On the other hand x86 Squids could be converted to Apaches later if they are the same kind of machine.
The ram issue propably also applies to the DB server, but i guess you'll order 64bit anyway for that.
I would hazard a guess that 1GB, maybe 2GB is all that should be needed. That should provide plenty of RAM for disk caching. Linux and Squid are pretty good about that. No need to spend a lot of money on 64-bit machines for the Squid servers.