[rescue] decisions, decisions

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

On Wed, Apr 27, 2005 at 02:50:17PM -0500, Bill Bradford wrote:
> A new system arrived today.
> 
> Ultra 60, maxed out with 2G RAM, dual 450Mhz CPUs, CD-ROM, floppy, and
> dual 36G HDs.  No framebuffer, as I was planning to run it headless.
> 
> Should I keep and use it as my Solaris 10 / OpenSolaris test/devel box,
> or should I try to sell/trade it and pick up an Opteron or AMD64-based
> CPU/motherboard/RAM and upgrade the BlueBox and run Solaris x86?
> 
> Thoughts?  Opinions?
> 
> Don't call me a heretic, here.  I've already got plenty of other SPARCs 
> (ohno.mrbill.net is a 420R with quad 450s and 4G RAM).

It is up to you.  

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.

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.

If you are pulling down the latest source code and re-installing to
keep current on the latest stuff, keep the U60.

Do you need more than 36GB disk space?  If not, keep the U60.

--Patrick