Marc Shapiro <marcns...@gmail.com> writes: > I don't know if this makes a difference, but... While this is a home > machine there are three of us here. Myself, my wife and daughter. We > are all logged in all the time and we are all running separate X > sessions all the time.
Get an Intel 4 or 6 core that provides reasonable performance at reasonable power consumption and price. Look at benchmarks and power consumption before you decide what to buy. AMD is cheaper and has a tendency of offering less performance with more power consumption. Make sure you get a board that has hardware MMU. There seem to be some available now. Save the SSD and get 16 or 32GB of RAM instead and do some tuning. I don't see in which way an SSD could actually benefit you. You're not booting all the time, and with 16 or 32GB RAM you'll have plenty disk cache which will, if needed, be used for other things than cache. That probably gives you better responsiveness and performance because (if I'm not mistaken) an SSD is slow compared to RAM and it avoids having to use swap space if you need RAM, so the benefit seems much greater and an SSD a waste of money. And the RAM doesn't wear out like SSDs and HDDs do. > a single core. If the former, then I can make use of some of those > extra cores, if the latter, then fewer cores running at faster speeds > does make more sense. Can anyone answer this question? I'd suggest at least 4 cores as fast as you can reasonably get. When someone runs something in their session that takes a while and someone else uses the computer in the meantime, you'll benefit from having the cores even more as usual. Scheduling can be dynamic and you can also dedicate cores to particular tasks if you want to. For your application, having 4 faster cores is probably better than having 6 or 8 slower ones. (I've been reading that the AMD CPUs have actually 4 cores that can run 2 threads in parallel, so they are cheating.) > If I decide that the extra cores are not useful then the hardware that > you recommend is a distinct possibility. Extra cores are very useful. Think of console-kit, it creates about a hundred+ threads on a single-user system and slows it down noticeably. Does it create 350 or so on a three-user system? Get rid of console-kit if you can ... or deploy another 50 CPU cores maybe to handle that or offload it to a server if that's possible ... :) More seriously, run make -j5 (when you have 4 cores) and things will be like 4 times as fast as if you have only one core. A lot of software makes use of cores, and even if it doesn't, you can have one core working on an X-server or a daemon like exim or clamav and the others can do something else. You already have at least three X-sessions, so I'd prefer 6 cores --- I'd do that anyway even for a single user system. >> My main worry is the hard drive. I currently have what I think is its >> older cousin, a 1 TB SATA II drive. > > Is there anything that speaks against keeping it? > > As I mentioned to Stan, I am hoping that the old box will run OK as a > server, without X and multiple logins. If so, then it will keep the > old drive. Ok, what for? If you have an NVIDIA graphics card and if you're changing resolution on the console, your crashes/freezes can be due to that. Try "GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=text" in /etc/default/grub to fix that. If you don't have crashes anymore then, you don't need to get new stuff. If you still have crashes, you already know that you do have unreliable hardware. Unreliable hardware is unsuited for a server. Maintaining a server creates additional work for you. Running a second computer increases power consumption. Having the server around takes up space. Adding the server on the UPS may overload it or can reduce battery time too much. You'll have a lot more cables around. You'll have like twice the noise. If you need a server for particular tasks and/or security, consider running it in a VM instead. If you use it as a file server, transfer speed is limited by network bandwidth. So now what are the advantages? Screw the SSD, get plenty RAM and a couple nice HDDs instead and, *by all means*, use RAID and backups. Get a hardware RAID controller like an HP Smart Array P800 off ebay if you can, or use at least software RAID. Avoid using LVM. Consider getting a used server off ebay. It might already come with a RAID controller, and you can get nice drive bays along with it. Find out what slots they have and if you can plug in a decent graphics card (since that has a major impact on responsiveness) and buy it with the RAM already installed (because they usually use ECC). You'll probably have more than sufficient processing power, perhaps even with two separate CPUs with 2 cores each. You get more reliability and it likely comes with a MMU. There are some disadvantages, though: They are heavy because they're solidly built, they may have oversized (~1000W) redundant power supplies and they can be freaking loud. Those problems can be solved, though. -- Debian testing iad96 brokenarch -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/878vapkopk....@yun.yagibdah.de
