> With all of that in mind... we were looking at a Dual PIII 1GHz w/2GB
SDRAM
> (god I love cheap RAM) and a 10K RPM SCSI drive. I'd love to hear any
> suggestions, comments, etc. We'd also like to know if anyone recommends
> upgrading to Xeons or quad processors.
I happen to run a quad Xeon, and at the time that we bought it, it was
the best machine we could get in terms of price for the performance that
we needed. However, there are some serious drawbacks. First and formost,
the 100 MHz bus is shared for all four processors, giving each processor
an effective 25 MHz bus under load. Not good. Also, Xeons and related
motherboards are very expensive, and the speeds don't go as high as the
commodity processors.
If I were to set up another machine now, I'd use a dual Athlon. For
not much more than the dual P3 would cost you, you could have a 2.4 GHz
machine with DDR RAM - and here's the real kicker, the dual Athlon boards
have a seperate 266 MHz bus to *each* processor, and a 266 MHz bus to the
RAM - so it's like each CPU having a 256 MHz bus to the chipset, and a 133
MHz bus to the RAM - about 5 times the bandwidth that a Xeon has in a
quad-configuration, and twice what a P3 would have. It's a win in every
regard over the Xeons and P3's, in my opinion.
As for the disk, the disk speed isn't terribly important, provided that
you're not using fsync() and have plenty of RAM for caching. On our quad
Xeon with 1.5 GB's, the disk lights only blink very occasionally.
However, we do use RAID 5 + hot spare for redundancy, so that a disk
failure won't take us down.
steve