[rescue] Compaq Proliant 8000

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Fri, 30 Apr 2004 @ 13:43 -0400, Dave McGuire said:

> On Apr 30, 2004, at 1:07 PM, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> >>>I have a shit-box PC: 700MHz AMD K7, 256MB RAM, dual Adaptec 2940 
> >>>SCSI,
> >>>nVidia graphics, emu10k sound, and misc other pieces.
> >>>
> >>And again... say it with me G5, or iMac.
> >
> >Nice machine, not a workstation.
> 
>   By what metric?

No metric.

I do think of the Apple as a workstation.

But in the thread I thought workstation == UNIX workstation.

> It is a very widely known fact that the PC architecture has "issues"  
> with performance in context switching.                                

PC motherboards have had this problem for a very long time, and things
like IDE only make it worse.  

However, the Intel CPUs themselves aren't that bad.  Linux has a fairly
good reputation for fast context switching, and does a lot of work to
get around PC architecture problems.  I would not want that job.

Imagine how much better OS design would be if they could focus on that
instead of working around bad hardware.

Kernel 2.6 is a huge improvement, should you get a chance to give it a
try.

If you run IDE drives, it pays you to use a SCSI controller that talks
IDE, so it can absorb the overhead.  True on any machine of course, but
on a PC it is especially helpful because I/O gets much smoother.

> Start one compile, and it'll be fine.  Start two, and watch your
> performance spiral into the toilet.

Not on my system.

Your PC must really suck worse than normal, because this is a gross
exaggeration from my experience.  PCs suck, but not *that* bad.

How about three large builds, a large background copy, and Gnome 2.6?

I'm getting 90% of SCSI bus speed through SGI's xfs filesystem,
and the system remains responsive.  

% w
 15:52:35 up 15:18, 10 users,  load average: 9.17, 8.16, 4.52

I think that's decent considering the Gnome overload this machine is
sagging under right now.

What would you expect to see on your system?





-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["I wish life was not so short. Languages
take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about." - J.
R. R. Tolkien]