[rescue] Sun ultra 5 questions

[jdboyd at jdboyd.zill.net]

On Wed, Nov 26, 2003 at 09:27:17AM -0600, Bill Bradford wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 26, 2003 at 09:12:39AM -0500, jdboyd at jdboyd.zill.net wrote:
> > I haven't tried anything other than 9 on my machine, but 9 on 128megs of 
> > ram appears to work OK.  It would be more ram, except the additional memory 
> > still hasn't arrived, and I couldn't keep waiting to put the machine in 
> > colo.  After the memory arrives, I plan to wait until I can get some other 
> > upgrades in (I want a CPU upgrade to a chip with more L2, but can't afford
> > it at the moment) before actually upgrading the machine.
> 
> ohno.mrbill.net is an Ultra 5/333Mhz with an 80G IDE hard drive.  I ran 
> everything fine on 256M of RAM (although I currently have 512).

Emacs in particular, and everything else in general seems much faster on 
ohno that it does on this machine (I currently am  sshed into both).  In 
both cases it is emacs 21.

However, you do have a faster CPU, more L2, more RAM, and possibly a faster 
IDE disk*, so there are lots of possible variables, including the ever
popular I-screw-something-up variable.

I plan to, when I can afford it, upgrade to a 2Meg L2 CPU and 512megs of 
ram.  Perhaps later still I will switch it to all SCSI.  We shall see.
If I was to do something so drastic, I'd have to seriously consider if it
would be better to just completely replace the machine.

*Is the 80gig disk in Ohno the same as the one you sent me?  Because in my
1U Celeron system the 30gig Maxtor nothing special disk I took out actually
tests faster with hdparm than the 80gig disk does.  And according to 
hdparm, the proper DMA etc settings are being used.  It's not important. It
still can more than saturate the network, and it was a much needed capacity
upgrade.