On Fri, May 12, 2006 7:05 am, Joel Rees wrote: > > On 2006.5.12, at 10:01 AM, Mike Schienle wrote: > >> >> Hi all - >> >> I just installed an Intel Mac Mini as a replacement for a dual 1.8 GHz >> G5 at >> my colocation place a couple days ago. > > Can I ask a silly question in public, or would off-list be more > appropriate?
I thought that would raise an eyebrow :-) The G5 began having stability problems. It would stop authenticating users (email, ftp, logins, etc. would fail, but web server would continue) after anywhere from 2 to 24 hours. I have two internal disks, 80 GB for OS and 250 GB for DB and web sites, and two external disks that are essentially backups for the internals (all 7200 RPM). I ran disk checks on all of them. I cloned internals to externals one at a time and had the exact same issues. After many attempts to hunt down the root cause (from launchd to securityd and a few other areas), it was time for stabs in the dark. I replaced the OS on the external, which was an upgrade from 10.3.x to a fresh install of 10.4. That actually made things worse, it went from failing to authenticate to complete lockups within a few minutes, so back to the original setup thanks to being able to shuffle things around with the spare disks. The next attempt was to start swapping/rotating RAM modules (I had recently gone from 1.25 GB to 4 GB), to see if one was flaky. No change. The current guess is a problem with the power supply. At this point I just needed to put something stable in place and fix the problem behind the scenes. As soon as that happens I expect to put the G5 back. I'm definitely happy with the Intel (dual core) Mac Mini so far. Database access is about 15% slower for a couple long queries (20+ minutes), which I'm assuming is because they went from a FW800 attachment to FW400, though it might be because of the internal Mac Mini disk being a 5400 RPM laptop drive. The mysql executable is on the internal drive, but the data lives on the external drive. I'd appreciate some thoughts on that. The Mini has 2 GB RAM, the G5 had 4 GB, though the speed of the long queries was the same with 1.25 GB, 2 GB or 4 GB on the G5. I don't have any real benchmarks other than the long DB queries. Overall, it feels faster than the G5. It serves up CGI's and pages, processes files, runs programs, etc. as fast as the G5. Mike Schienle
