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From: dillon@flea.best.net (Matt Dillon)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sco.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.sys.sgi.misc
Subject: Re: no such thing as a "general user community"
Date: 18 Mar 1997 14:47:01 -0800
Organization: BEST Internet Communications, Inc.
Lines: 63
Message-ID: <5gn615$9cu@flea.best.net>
References: <331BB7DD.28EC@net5.net> <3327BBF9.784A@earthlink.net> <5g9jad$bo3@flea.best.net> <5glbkq$io6$3@kayrad.ziplink.net>
NNTP-Posting-Host: flea.best.net
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.sco.misc:36936 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:37429 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:6403 comp.sys.sgi.misc:29310
:In article <5glbkq$io6$3@kayrad.ziplink.net>,
:Mikhail Teterin <mi@ALDAN.ziplink.net..remove-after-`net'> wrote:
:>Honorable Matt Dillon
:> wrote on 13 Mar (in article <5g9jad$bo3@flea.best.net>):
:>
:>= I can only think of a few companies that would actually need
:>= more I/O bandwidth then a standard PCI bus gives you.
:>
:> My ISP (Ziplink.net) is changing their news and mail servers
:> from Intel (PPros?) with FreeBSD to DEC Alpha with Digital
:> Unix, because they think they maxed out Intel configuration...
:>
:> Just my 2 cents.
:>
:> -mi
:>
:>--
:> "Windows for dummies"
They are making a mistake with news... a big mistake. I run several
VERY heavily loaded news machines and what maxes out, always, is the
disk or the memory. A disk configuration is a disk configuration
no matter what platform you are running on. Memory capacity is memory
capacity.. the memory requirements for a particular program are about
the same no matter what platform you run it on. I can run
well over 380 NNTP sessions on our newsreader machine
with 256MB of memory.
Mail is highly dependant on the configuration. I have been able to
max-out the cpu on our mail machines on occassion, but most of the
time it's the memory that gets maxed out. With 128MB of ram, one can
run on the order of 150 to 200 sendmail processes. The current ppro
motherboards we get are capable of holding up to 256MB of ram (and we
put 256MB of ram in our newsreader machines, so I know it works).
A number of ppro motherboards, most noteably the duel-cpu motherboards,
will take half a gig of ram or more.
The only way Ziplnik is maxing out their PC's is if they are using
older motherboards / processors in them. In this case, they need only
replace them with new motherboards / processors... a significantly less
expensive solution then changing platforms to DEC Alphas.
I think of it like this: The major cost for us now are the disk drives.
The pentium pro motherboard and cpu is almost in the noise. Short of
maxing out the cpu, there is no reason for us to pay premium prices for
vendor-proprietary hardware (even WITH the discount), vendor 'approved'
memory, or vendor 'approved' hard drives. The basic box from most vendors
without any memory or disk will easily be two or three times the cost
of a rack-mounted ppro 200 WITH memory.
There is no longer a major difference in hardware reliability between the
proprietary platforms and the PC platforms. There WAS a major difference
two years ago, but not any more. We, in fact, were purchasing Indy's
and challenge S's two years ago precisely BECAUSE the hardware was more
reliable. But not any more.
And if people disapprove of FreeBSD... well, fine. Run solaris then. SUN
has seen the writing on the wall in regards to loosing their low and medium
end hardware monopoly. Don't like Solaris? run Linux. run SCO.
run BSDI. There are plenty of choices.
-Matt