Scott,
> Also, if it's a read only environment, RAID5 with n drives equals the
> performance of RAID0 with n-1 drives.
True.
> Josh, you gotta get out more. IA32 has supported >4 gig ram for a long
> time now, and so has the linux kernel. It uses a paging method to do it.
> Individual processes are still limited to ~3 gig on Linux on 32 bit
> hardware though, so the extra mem will almost certainly spend it's time as
> kernel cache.
Not that you'd want a sigle process to grow that large anyway.
So what is the ceiling on 32-bit processors for RAM? Most of the 64-bit
vendors are pushing Athalon64 and G5 as "breaking the 4GB barrier", and even
I can do the math on 2^32. All these 64-bit vendors, then, are talking
about the limit on ram *per application* and not per machine?
This has all been academic to me to date, as the only very-high-ram systems
I've worked with were Sparc or micros.
--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco