On Thu, 08 Jan 2004 14:03:19 -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Jens Frank wrote:
1 CPU at 2.4GHZ P4. (They offer a cheaper Celeron, I'm not sure if the P4 is worth the extra money for webserving or not.)
The 2,6 GHz is 1$ cheaper. If you want to buy the same boxes for all purpose (squid+apache), I'd go for the faster CPU.
To be sure that I understand. For essentially the same price, you recommend a 2.6Ghz Celeron over a 2.4Ghz Pentium? That sounds fine to me, I just don't know how the differences between Celeron and Pentium affect performance for webserving.
I think for the Apaches we should look for the most cpu we can get for the money- no remote control, no RAID, but enough ram to not swap. It's very likely that we could get much more cpu power for the money by buying nine modest 2Ghz machines rather than five 2.6Ghz Pentium4 with RAID. Prices are usually disproportionally higher for the latest compared to the average, latest four-months-ago machines. Double price often doesn't buy double performance. Rack space doesn't seem to be a problem, so the only drawback would be the installation work. This shouldn't be that bad- after configuring one machine we would just copy over the image to the others anyway.
The SM-1151SATA has non-ECC memory. Being used to ECC and even hot spare memory, I'm not comfortable with this. 2*1GB is what I'd use, too.
What's the current memory consumption on pliny/larousse?
(...)
Keep in mind that we are going to have easy hands-on access to the servers, and we're going to be in a facility that's staffer 24x7 with free "remote hands" service for things like pushing a reset button and typing a few things on the console, sticking in a floppy, etc.
For me, all these things just mean that having cheap but many Apaches would bring more performance.
I woudn't want to use a cheap machine for the DB- or file servers and not for the squids (they benefit a lot from ram), but the Apaches are the place where the extra dollars for high-end hardware would buy very little.
What's google based on? Are they even using desktop pcs for the cpu work?