I'm planning on building several Debian/Linux compute and disk servers, the aim is for maximum remote "workstation" performance with no frills. The target hardware is:
* Dual processor PII 400MHz (450MHz if they were available) * 512Mbyte or 1Gbyte RAM (likely to be limited by 4 slots at 128Mbyte) * IBM 16.8 Gbyte EIDE disk (these are nice) * SMC EPIC100 100 Mbps ethernet (if not on motherboard) * No video card/monitor/mouse/keyboard except at installation To note: * The aim is a fast and cheap machine - the cheaper they are the more that can be bought. * There is no SCSI drive: My assumption is that with this much RAM Linux will cache any frequently used executables. Most of the time I expect the system to be compute bound. * My experience with Sparc Ultra is that a running job is lost if you really need more RAM than the physical memory - disk just hasn't kept pace with CPU performance. Under such conditions swap is only useful for stopped or infreqently used processes, so perhaps it doesn't matter if it is a bit slower than SCSI. * I'll need many 128 Mbyte swap partitions under 2.0. I've only ever created primary partitions and there is a limit of four - will I have a problem in creating 8 * 128 Mbyte partions on one disk? * I've got a Dual PPro system (2.0.35) going at the moment - both processors run fine with long CPU bound jobs. I've just (today) started seeing NFS problems when writing to the internal disk from a Solaris machine - I see 8192 byte blocks corrupted from "similar" files. I've yet to track down the cause. * The disk is mostly for external use. I'm not sure it this requires a 2.1 kernel for the new NFS support. * I'll probably go for an Intel motherboard for safety. However, this (with the CPUs) is the majority of the cost. * Parity on RAM used to be considered at very important - there doesn't seem to be all that much concern anymore - is this justified? Breakdown (from http://www.woc.co.uk unless http://www.transtec.co.uk or http://www.dabs.co.uk) Motherboard GBP1219 Dual 400MHz Nightshade 100MHz Server scsi/network Memory GBP484 4 * 128MByte 168 PIN 100MHz SDRAM Case GBP111 Full Tower ATX case, 235W ATX, K/B FDD GGP15 3.5", Teac 1.44MB floppy disc drive + cradle HDD GBP300 IBM-DTTA-3516800 16 Gbyte hard disk (transtec) NIC GBP45 EtherPowerII 10/100 PCI (dabs) m/b includes this All prices exclude VAT (17.5%). I post this for general comment - no doubt it will go out of date very soon indeed, but I've spent some time researching this so any discussion will probably help me and others thinking of very cheap compute/disk servers - not so long ago I paid this much for just the disk! Tony Robinson -- http://www-svr.eng.cam.ac.uk/~ajr
