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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!arclight.uoregon.edu!news.uoregon.edu!Symiserver2.symantec.com!news From: tedm@agora.rdrop.com Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: freeBSD and P6/180 Date: 2 Nov 1996 21:57:02 GMT Organization: Symantec Corp. Lines: 64 Message-ID: <55gg3e$n3v@Symiserver2.symantec.com> References: <32784DB5.2BDE@sybase.com> Reply-To: tedm@agora.rdrop.com NNTP-Posting-Host: shiva1.central.com X-Newsreader: IBM NewsReader/2 v1.2.5 In <32784DB5.2BDE@sybase.com>, Taras Dowhaluk <tarasd@sybase.com> writes: >Ladies and Gentlemen, > >I'm about to setup a Web Host and as a result of much digging thru >truckloads of FAQS, web pages, newsgroups, mags etc, I've picked >Apache as the Web Server and either freeBSD or openBSD as the OS >(to start with anyway). > >The planned (but not yet purchased) hardware is > PentiumPro 180MHZ, > motherboard is P/I-P6NP5, 2xPCI Bus Master IDE ports, > Award PentiumPro PCI BIOS with DMI, blah, blah, blah, > 48Mb EDO RAM, > 2x2.1Gb Seagate IDE (ST32140A), > S3 Virge 1Mb > Intel EtherExpressPro 10/100 > CD-ROM Panasonic CR583B or Mitsumi CRMCFX810S > >Has anyone played with such a configuration ? > >Any advice/experiences much appreciated. > Whoa here! What you described sounds like a great Doom-playing, Winblows NT 4.0 Macintosh-wannabe, but a stinky server. If I were you I would just buy a Pentium, instead of a Pro, and take the money you will save and cram the thing as full of RAM as you can afford. Also, what do you have to have a fancy graphics card in a server for, just use any old cheap junky VGA card, and take the extra $250 you spend on the fancy graphics card and put it into RAM. Also, EDO ram is completely unsuitable for use in a server, as it has no parity checking. (unless the server supports ECC EDO memory, and I never heard of such a thing) Buy standard parity SIMMS and leave the EDO in the garbage-grade cheap piece of junk desktop machines that go "vroom vroom" You didn't say what the bandwith of the data pipe is that you are connected to, but if your serving pages up over a T1, your only using 1.5 megabits of bandwith, a Pentium 133 can easily keep a T1 line completely saturated. What is going to kill your performance is if the thing starts swapping, espically if you are swapping through an IDE subsytem. Web servers, espically with all the CGI crap that people like to put on them, tend towards the model of having many simultaneous processes going at once, that don't necessairly need a lot of CPU, rather than a few processes that need a lot of CPU time. Each of these processes has to occupy RAM memory, and if they cannot be placed in real RAM, and end up going to the disk your network performance is going to stink. Dump all the IDE junk. There is no current busmastering IDE driver in FreeBSD, which means that even though the motherboard may claim to be "IDE busmastering" your going to be running in PIO mode. The only current server OS that I know of that supports IDE busmastering is Windows NT 4.0 Worse than running in PIO mode though, is that the IDE channel cannot support stuff like hundreds of queued commands, the way that a modern SCSI card and disk can. Cheap NCR/Symbosis PCI scsi cards can be had for $80 and along with modern SCSI drives will make a much better server than any IDE arraingment you can come up with.