> On the other hand, database servers really can be, as Lyle puts it,
> "castoffs old pieces of junk". We run ours Sparc 1's, with a couple
> of other services (NTP, DNS, temperature monitoring) on the same
> machines, and we've not seen any performance problems caused by this.
Interesting that you say that. A few years ago (spring of 1995, I
believe) we were using DECstation 5000.25s as our DB servers. We were
also having fairly regular "meltdowns". IIRC, going to AFS 3.3a on
our servers helped this a little, but did not solve the problem. I
believe teh problem was solved when we upgraded our db servers
(especially the sync site) to faster machines (Sparcstation 20's in
our case.) I suppose it is possible that I am mis-remembering, but I
thought that load related problems were also what caused us to upgrade
our db servers to the aforementioned DECstations in the fall of 1992.
Jonathon Weiss
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
MIT/IS Athena Server Operations
