Hello everyone from Greece,
I am about to setup my small business and will purchase hardware for two OF servers among others. I am aware of the minimum system requirements for a successful setup, but I need to know the impact on OF performance with the increase of memory and/or CPU speed. What follows are my thoughts on the matter. Please feel welcome to reply with your thoughts/experience so I can decide better on where to spend my budget. To start off, I know that Openfiler was build in order to turn old, unused hardware into an affordable file server/NAS solution. It is built on Linux distros so sys requirements are kept low. - Concerning the CPU speed. When my customers ask me what to purchase and whether it is worth to spend money on faster CPUs I reply with something like this: "Well, CPUx costs x money and runs at 1,8 and CPUy costs twice as much as CPUx and runs at 2. So when you start your word processor it will take 3 seconds for it to start on a pc with CPUx, but it will take 4 or maybe 5 seconds to start on a pc with CPUy installed. Do you think it is worth to spend twice the money?" For those of you that will post their thoughts please do not turn this into a fight between AMD and Intel funs. All I am interested in is if it is worth to invest on a few extra MHz and always talking with an Openfiler installation in mind. Also if anyone has had experience with upgrading an Openfiler installation from single to dual CPU system, I would be most interested to hear whether you've noticed significant performance increase or not. - As for RAM now. I know that with regular OSs the more applications you have running along with the OS the more RAM you need. That is because each time the OS reaches its RAM limit it starts writing to the hard drive cache which is much slower. From what I know OF uses a small amount of RAM to load onto and run. I don't know how or if extra RAM would help and since it's been quite a lot time since I went through the OF manual (actually of version's 1.1 manual) I cannot recall if OF has a caching mechanism that needs RAM or not. OF experts please share your knowledge. - I was also thinking of load balancing (a.k.a. extra NICs onboard) and failover (a.k.a. second OF mirrored installation). Any success stories here? Is it supported by OF at all? Please feel free to point me to manual pages or websites/forums/blogs on these maters. I am currently going through https://project.openfiler.com/tracker/browser/openfiler/trunk/doc/cluster_gu ide/openfiler-ha.html?format=raw but that says it is for OF 1.1 and it is also a draft. Any other resources? Thank you all in advance for your time. My regards, Greg.
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