[rescue] decisions, decisions

[Peter Corlett]

Patrick Giagnocavo <patrick at mail.zill.net> wrote:
[...]
> My opinion is that if you are doing a lot of Perl or other interpreted
> language stuff, go for AMD64 - Perl has an amazing ability to bog down
> a CPU, in my experience.  In terms of performance, even the lowest-end
> Opteron will stomp the U60 over CPU-bound tasks.

My understanding of the internals of Perl would suggest that it's
quite good at thrashing the cache (since it compiles to a parse tree
and then interprets that tree) and might not benefit too much from
having loads of registers.

My take on OSes and hardware is that you should make the most
appropriate match:

SPARC: Solaris
x86: Debian
PPC: OSX
m68k: whatever it came with (AmigaOS or MacOS 7 in the case of my pile)

... so if there is a requirement for Solaris (ick), I'd get a Sun box.

> If you are doing stuff in C or PHP (a thin layer over top of libc
> oriented towards web pages) then keep the U60 as it will be good.

I'm not sure you can really describe PHP as a thin layer over the top
of libc. PHP is what Microsoft would invent if they were trying to
clone Perl.

-- 
Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.
								- Quentin Crisp