Ian Linwood <ian@dinwoodi.plus.com> writes:
> On Mon, 10 Sep 2001 21:14:33 +0000 (UTC), teg@redhat.com (Trond Eivind
> Glomsrød) wrote:
>
> >> - Hardware: dual / quad Intel class
> >
> >Athlon gives more bang for the buck - the dual Athlons are _really_
> >nice, and have proven stable as well.
> >
> Agreed, single Athlons are much better than single Intels, but I still
> think Intel win in the SMP game. As for stability, I think it's a tad
> too early to make such a statement.
Their SMP works very well, and has less bus competition than Intel (of
course, this means making motherboards gets more complicated(.
> >I'd probably go for a 3ware RAID instead... IDE disks are so much
> >cheaper nowadays than SCSI, and the premium isn't really justifiable
> >anymore.
> >
> Aargh, No! SCSI is MUCH better under load and more reliable. I've yet
> to see an enterprise server utilise IDE raid.
Mostly prejudice - 3ware is not a lowend "software disguised as
hardware" RAID. It looks like a SCSI disk to your system, and handles
stress very well. Remember - everything is hardware, there is nothing
to stress on your system by using IDE in the subsystem.
> >> - OS: Prolly FreeBSD (FFS is your friend (what with syncs and all) and it
> >> can do multi proc support
> >
> >I'd recommend Linux, which has more mature MP support and scales
> >better, but I'm obviously biased :). It's of course very important to
> >keep what you are familiar with - a good sysadmin makes a world of
> >difference no matter what you're using.
>
> I'd recommend Solaris, which has MUCH more mature MP support!
We're talking 2-4 CPUs here. Linux has no problems with that, and is
much more mature on x86 than Solaris (it's not their primary platform,
by a long shot)
> If you do decide to use Linux, check out ReiserFS file system.
ReiserFS has had plenty problems, and is still not something I'd
consider safe. Also, performance for postgresql on reiserfs was a
quite a bit slower than ext3 and XFS the last time I checked (which
was 4-5 months ago). Avoid it.
--
Trond Eivind Glomsrød
Red Hat, Inc.