On 15/09/06, Shlomi Fish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi Amos!
Gmail does not quote the last line of the original message before the
response. As a result, your message is messed up.
I switched to plain text mode now. Hope it'll help.
I also reply only to linux-il since this is the only mailing list on
which I'm subscribed (and cross-posting is usually against netiquette,
and most relevant people are on linux-il anyway).
> > 2. We'd like to configure a 2 GB swap partition. However, I need the RAID
> > array to back up the data on one of the 2 GB swap partitions of the SCSI
> > disks. However, the RAID array is currently completely inactive, and we
> > need
> > to activate it. Lior, can you please step on it?
>
> As a last-resort fall-back line before system crash - maybe consider using
> dynamic swap space allocators like swapd or swapspace:
>
> http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/swapd
> http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/swapspace
>
If we have 3 GB or so of memory, then I don't suppose we'll need more swap.
1. I got the impression from your ogirinal post that the root cause
for the reboot was running out of memory. Isn't it so?
2. I suggested this as an extra precaution to be used when the only
other option is for the system to give up and start killing processes
or generally go south.
> (the copyright file should usually point to the upstream site. It appears
> that Eskimo already runs Sarge but these packages are not available there -
> it's about time to upgrade to Etch. I didn't find these packages in
> Backports).
Etch... has Etch been stabilised yet?
It's not officially stable but it's been practically usable for a long
time now. I have two such system now (my home and work desktops) and
they are superb. As far as I followed, already being supported by the
Debian Security Team so this part (which should probably be number one
on the list of production servers requirements) is covered.
>
> Do you have information on what's hogging the system's memory and for what?
> Possibly a more scalable and stable way to handle the problem should be to
> try to avoid or minimize the memory hog.
> Usually when the system uses so much swap it's already crawling.
Well, we recently switched from ezmlm to using sympa which has a daemon that
consumes about 10% of the memory, and possibly some other things.
10% doesn't explain running out of memory.
Also first thing I found about Simpa was this:
http://www.sympa.org/doc/html/node2.html#SECTION00220000000000000000
(tuning)
> 64GB memory is going to be expensive.
That's not what I meant sorry. What I meant was that the computer model could
support up to at least 64 GB of memory in case we'll need to scale to this
amount of memory in the future.
If you have the money for it then go for it:
http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x2200/
other servers in this series offer pretty amazing redundancy options
(you can practically replace any part of the system except the chassis
without taking it down).
(disclaimer: I own SUNW shares)
From where I sit it looks like you are jumping too far ahead - a
mail+web server of this scale shouldn't require more than the 2-4Gb
you can put on your current system. By the time you'll get around to
actually take advantage of more memory the hardware scene might be
different and more importantly - hardware supporting this amount of
RAM will probably cost half or less than current prices.
For your consideration.
> As for the 500MHz it sounds indeed
> poor but what's the CPU utilization like right now? What does it choke on?
Well, the machine seems to be responsive enough. But we may need more CPU to
serve dynamic content.
So the current CPU resource is sufficient for CURRENT requirements? I
got the impression you are trying to prevent the system from crashing
because of some resource shortage, isn't it? If not then what's this
discussion about? "Eskimo is a 500MHz Pentium III, let's replace it"?
If it works then why break it?
Again - thanks for maintaining this important server for the community.
Cheers,
--Amos
--
"Military justice is to justice what military music is to music"
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