[K12OSN] Server specs....how low can you go?

[Gavin Chester]

On Wed, 2006-07-12 at 19:58 -0500, ssanders at coin.org wrote:
> Chiming in with everyone else on this one, and a question later.
-snip-
> Along these lines? As far as recycling old junkers go, what does
> everyone think about a dual 533 w/768 meg of ram vs. the mentioned AMD
> 900 w/512? The dual 533 is the old Abit BP6, and has been reliable for
> me (I built it when BP6 was new and hot stuff, several years ago). 
> 
> Would the SMP kernel and more ram offset the slower speed of the dual
> CPU's? The drive I/O and network would remain the same.

Many, many times on this list multi-CPU machines have been recommended
for terminal servers.  The benefits are that sometimes a single user can
take the CPU right up to >90% briefly.  When that happens everyone
suffers.  With dual CPU (or more - my dual Xeon with hyperthreading is
seen as four CPUs) then such occurrences have minimal/no impact on other
users.  Having switched from a single to dual CPU machine, I can attest
to the benefit.

As to the comparison between the two machines you have:
They are fairly close in speed to start with, so go with the dual CPU
machine every time.  Just watch your bottlenecks such as RAM, disk IO,
and network speed :-)  The SMP kernel won't offset the slower speed, as
such, it will allow full use of the SMP architecture, however.  If
you're happy using slower PCs (ie, you have patience when opening apps,
and so on) then the dual 533 is a very usable server - just look for
some more RAM to make it better.  You don't say what type of hard drive.
If SCSI, then you're laughing, but if old IDE drives, then that will be
a bottleneck for more than a handful of users, I'm told.

HTH

Gavin.