Which hardware?

[Knut Yrvin]

Fredag 16 juni 2006 05:30, skrev Dan Young:
> I'd like some of those servers. ;-) I've seen more like 5-6 minutes
> for 30 kids to do that on a dual 2.4GHz Xeon (somewhat memory starved
> at 2.5 GB of RAM) stipulating the "all at once" scenario I described.

That's why 4 GB is mandatory :)

ECC PC3200 RAM has 3.200 GByte/s bandwith. 
Ultra2 Wide SCSI has 80 MByte/s bandwith. 

The ratio is 40:1 between disk swap and use of RAM. If the OS handles 
RAM as it does with disk swap (as it doesn't), then the start up is 8 
seconds with RAM instead of 5 minutes with swap. But using RAM directly 
without the swap paging algorithm also saves clock cycles. 

So the startup time is 5-6 sec on a system with enough RAM, and the
main applications already used earlier on the day (stored in the temp
area in RAM). When the system uses swapping on disk, the performance
drops drastic.

http://home.lanet.lv/~sd70058/aboutos/node99.html

So enough RAM is really helping when you need interactive 
performance ...

Regards 

Knut Yrvin