[K12OSN] Quad 450's as K12 Server?

[Terrell Prude', Jr.]

Funny you should ask.  Our mail dudez recently gave us an "old" quad 
500MHz Compaq box with RAID 5 (I think it's an 8000) and 2.5GB DRAM, and 
K12LTSP 3.1.2 now runs on it.  So, I can give you feedback about my box.

All of my apps' threads each run at the speed of the 500Mhz chips, but 
since I have four chips, things balance out very nicely.  Response time 
is quite sufficient.  The RAID 5 is great; if I need to swap, it's much 
faster than on a single disk.  Loading programs is also quite fast for 
an "old" box like this, due partly to the RAID 5.  Now, my Dual Athlon 
box will handily smoke this quad 500 when it comes to anything 
CPU-bound, and I haven't done a head-to-head scientific comparo, but my 
quad 500 certainly does the job.

I think it'd be worth it to toss that 3GB DRAM into your quad 450.  
Remember, with more than one CPU, you can actually be physically 
executing multiple processes at the same time.  And you're getting three 
of 'em?  I'd so be all over that....

--TP

John Baillie wrote:

>Hello,
>
>A parent in our school is donating 3 Compaq 6000's servers to our
>school. They are quad P450's with 1 GB RAM and an array of 9GB HD's. I
>think they can handle 8GB RAM. I didn't shop too long but it looks like
>the going rate is about 260.00 USD per 1 GB stick of ram. Would it be a
>worth investment to spend the $ to add 3 GB to these beasts and use them
>for a K12 server?.
>
>How does a quad 450 stack up against a current model single processor at
>say 1.8Ghz
>
>John
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>K12OSN mailing list
>K12OSN at redhat.com
>https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/k12osn
>For more info see <http://www.k12os.org>
>
>  
>