Just an initial suggestion... Maybe we could order a couple AMD machines (i.e. 2 or 3) and test them out as apaches against the current apahes. If they don't seem to give us as much preformance/price on apache and search, we just get P4's for the other 2 or 3. Even if the AMD's are a little lower in performace (which all AMD benchmarks I've seen in the past 2 years seem to disagree with) they still might save us enough money to allow us to justify getting them over the P4s. Of course, we could try and find volenteers with the exact hardware we want to try and benchmark the prociessors for us, but I don't think that will happen.
Also, a little off topic, but have we considered using CentOS on our machines? I just found out about it recently. Basically, it's a redistribution of redhat enterprise. It's more stable than Fedora so it might be worth using.
On 4/19/05, Chad Perrin perrin@apotheon.com wrote:
On Mon, Apr 18, 2005 at 11:02:20PM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
Note that my own personal prejudice runs in favor of AMD; I buy Athlons for my home PCs and hiss and boo Intel at every opportunity. But if we're going to make purchasing decisions explicitly based on a price/performance claim I think we need something more than warm fuzzy feelings of fighting The Man.
Plus, y'know, Intel may be The Man in this comparison, but AMD is The Other Man.
-- Chad Perrin [ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
mbecker said:
Also, a little off topic, but have we considered using CentOS on our machines? I just found out about it recently. Basically, it's a redistribution of redhat enterprise. It's more stable than Fedora so it might be worth using.
For stability, really it's hard to beat BSD if it'll talk to your hardware.
Tony Sidaway wrote:
mbecker ™ said:
Also, a little off topic, but have we considered using CentOS on our machines? I just found out about it recently. Basically, it's a redistribution of redhat enterprise. It's more stable than Fedora so it might be worth using.
For stability, really it's hard to beat BSD if it'll talk to your hardware.
Do we have any practical problems with OS stability?
--Jimbo
Tony Sidaway (minorityreport@bluebottle.com) [050421 04:59]:
Jimmy Wales said:
Tony Sidaway wrote:
For stability, really it's hard to beat BSD if it'll talk to your hardware.
Do we have any practical problems with OS stability?
If not, stick with what you have.
Well, yeah. Every Unix is pretty much reliable enough for these purposes. At that point it can be a bigger problem adapting to the funny little ways of a different OS than whatever improvements may come with a change. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Kate has mentioned that a server or two are being tested on FreeBSD, which she prefers personally, but the fact it's a different OS means a new set of quirks to learn. Which is presumably worth learning about, but is an important factor to consider.
- d.
On Wednesday, April 20, 2005 2:55 PM, mbecker T wikimb@gmail.com wrote:
Of course, we could try and find volenteers with the exact hardware we want to try and benchmark the prociessors for us, but I don't think that will happen.
Well, the first step in that regards would be an easy way to come up with numbers for comparison; if there was a little (or not so little) PHP test script that I could run on the command line of any machine of mine with Apache/PHP/MySQL installed, that might be helpful. I dunno, maybe not.
Yours,
Of course, we could try and find volenteers with the exact hardware we want to try and benchmark the prociessors for us, but I don't think that will happen.
I have the external test suite working now, and it's designed specifically for multi-threaded benchmarks. If there's something we need to specifically test, just point me to two machines that differ only in the variable and I'll give you numbers (I did this for MySQL 4, for example, before we decided to make that upgrade).
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