Dual 64 bit Opteron mainboards are available with 8 DIMM sockets
capable
of taing 16Gb. eg: http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8w_spec.html
Right, we have one of those (though broken at the moment). Right now, our entire db should fit comfortably in 4 gig of Ram, which we have.
But I totally agree with you about the importance of avoiding the hard drive as much as possible.
--Jimbo
Just to throw my 2 cents-worth into the debate - any particular reason for running on Intel? An Xserve dual G5 gives better price/performance and is (possibly) much easier to administer. It's probably also likely to be more reliable. I'm not an Apple apologist, but I think these machines should be at least given fair consideration. If not, why not?
--Graham
Graham Cox wrote:
Just to throw my 2 cents-worth into the debate - any particular reason for running on Intel? An Xserve dual G5 gives better price/performance and is (possibly) much easier to administer. It's probably also likely to be more reliable. I'm not an Apple apologist, but I think these machines should be at least given fair consideration. If not, why not?
First, we are committed for internal ideological/political reasons to run Wikipedia on all free software. Perhaps if it could be shown that every element of Xserve that's actually in use by Wikipedia is open source (of course the OS X kernel is, and apache/php/etc would be, but I really don't know what else), this objection could be met.
Second, it seems very unlikely to me (though I could of course be proven wrong) that the Xserve dual G5 really gives better price/performance. Someone else suggested this to me the other day, so I went to Apple's website to price out what I take to be equivalent hardware -- the price is *significantly* higher (10-30%) than commodity Intel/AMD boxes running Linux. It is of course difficult to assess total performance, of course, without a specific head-to-head configuration. However, there was no obvious advantage to Apple to be sure.
----
There's a great irony in the world these days. If we placed organizations/operating systems on a spectrum from closed/proprietary to open/free, we'd have the free Unix-like systems all the way over to the right, and Microsoft over to the left, and (traditionally) Apple all the way over to the very very extreme left.
I would argue, and without much originality, that Apple's propensity to try to establish monopolostic situations has been their constant downfall. Apple would rather squeeze money out of people by locking them into specific choices than to grow their market with open standards. This has nearly killed them several times.
And they are operating true to form with the iPod/iTunes pairing. They seem to think that by refusing to interoperate cleanly with other alternatives, they will push for dominance. I.E., people will choose iTunes as their music store because iPod is go great, and they will choose iPod as their music device because the iTunes music store is go great, and the two interoperate together most cleanly.
But mark my words -- this will kill them, and in 10 years, Apple will have a tiny share of the legal downloads market.
--------
None of that is relevant to your question, of course. I'm just saying that there are good reasons for free software advocates to avoid Apple products.
(Let me be the first to accuse myself of hypocrisy, as I'm sitting here typing this on my very beloved G5 running OS X 10.3 Panther. It is a stunning work of art, and the best desktop Unix system in history.)
--Jimbo
Jimmy Wales schrieb:
First, we are committed for internal ideological/political reasons to run Wikipedia on all free software. Perhaps if it could be shown that every element of Xserve that's actually in use by Wikipedia is open source (of course the OS X kernel is, and apache/php/etc would be, but I really don't know what else), this objection could be met.
OS X is neither Open Source nor free, but there's a Linux distribution for Power Mac called Yellow Dog which is based on Red Hat Linux. Xserve is fine technology on the paper, but IMHO there's too little know-how with us about this technology. However it's never worth 10-30% more money for our purposes - unless Apple would donate or discount them ;)
Regards, -asb
On 15 Jan 2004, at 5:39 am, Agon S. Buchholz wrote:
Jimmy Wales schrieb:
First, we are committed for internal ideological/political reasons to run Wikipedia on all free software. Perhaps if it could be shown that every element of Xserve that's actually in use by Wikipedia is open source (of course the OS X kernel is, and apache/php/etc would be, but I really don't know what else), this objection could be met.
OS X is neither Open Source nor free, but there's a Linux distribution for Power Mac called Yellow Dog which is based on Red Hat Linux. Xserve is fine technology on the paper, but IMHO there's too little know-how with us about this technology. However it's never worth 10-30% more money for our purposes - unless Apple would donate or discount them ;)
Regards, -asb
I think what Mr. Wales meant was that Darwin, the core of OSX, is open source and free. I believe this would be sufficient to run Apache, etc, but of course the Linux solution could possibly be better.
As for the 10-30% extra cost, wouldn't it really depend on its performance? Suppose such a server could manage 50% more connections/load than the AMD? That would be like having 1.5 AMD machines, so it could well be "worth it". Unfortunately I have no idea whether this is in fact the case, though presumably somebody, somewhere does know. As for know-how, that's easy to come by. For a start you can simply use your favourite Unix (or Linux if you go that route) standard command line to set it up and run it, the rest will follow. I never felt that "the unknown" was ever much of an argument against doing something - how did mankind ever progress with that attitude?
Anyway, I read the rest of Mr. Wales' response with interest. I have no strong opinion, so I remain neutral on the subject - but I do feel all options should be given serious consideration and that appears to be the case.
--Graham
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