Re: [users] i386 or PowerPc
On Thu, May 24, 2001 at 08:50:33PM -0700, Mike Egglestone wrote: Weird... seems like hard drive performance is very important too:) In fact, disk is often more important than the processor! When building a box, I go for RAM, disk, and processor in that order. If you don't have enough RAM, performance will blow. Without enough storage life becomes boring. Make that storage large _and_ fast and life's quite exciting :) Too many people blow the budget on the processor and then wonder why the machine isn't as fast as they expected ... -- Nathan Norman - Staff Engineer | A good plan today is better Micromuse Ltd. | than a perfect plan tomorrow. mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] | -- Patton pgpSibEbFRcB8.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [users] i386 or PowerPc
On Thu, May 24, 2001 at 08:50:33PM -0700, Mike Egglestone wrote: Thanks for the input guys... I took it upon myself to do some VERY basic testing... and I'll share my results if anyone's interested. The test: untarring a 88MB file full of .gifs and .html files Imac 400 Mhz 128 Ram IDE drive time= 53 seconds Celeron 700 Mhz 128 Ram IDE drive time= 80 seconds Celeron 700 Mhz 128 Ram SCSI drive time=21 seconds... Weird... seems like hard drive performance is very important too:) You might do well to check out storagereview.com for disk performance stuff, there's a bit more to it than most people think :)
Re: [users] i386 or PowerPc
MaD dUCK wrote: also sprach Mike Egglestone (on Thu, 24 May 2001 07:00:44PM -0700): Which platform of hardware would be best? G4 from apple Pentium something from somewhere is that a serious question??? the pentium has nothing to say against the G4. period. moreover, CISC is just pittyful compared to RISC. Do you have any benchmark tests to back this up? I tend to agree with the CISC over RISC comment but I've never run any tests on a working machine. I've got a Pentium 4 on my desktop machine here and I love it. I can build a kernel in about 2 minutes and everything runs very well, but I don't have any numbers to back this up. I've also got a server with 2 pentium 3 1G processors in it, also lightning fast. Recently I put my hands on 10 Briqs from Total Impact. They've got a PPC [EMAIL PROTECTED] inside. The only problem I've had with them (other than installation which was, shall we say, a learning experience) is that the sources for the kernel aren't as stable for the PPC as they are for the i386. There have been some other source trees mentioned (BenH's) that I haven't had a chance to try out yet. Anyway, that's my story. later, Andy P.S. does anyone know of some benchmark tests I could run to compare these systems?
Re: [users] i386 or PowerPc
on Thu, May 24, 2001 at 08:50:33PM -0700, Mike Egglestone ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Thanks for the input guys... I took it upon myself to do some VERY basic testing... and I'll share my results if anyone's interested. The test: untarring a 88MB file full of .gifs and .html files Imac 400 Mhz 128 Ram IDE drive time= 53 seconds Celeron 700 Mhz 128 Ram IDE drive time= 80 seconds Celeron 700 Mhz 128 Ram SCSI drive time=21 seconds... Weird... seems like hard drive performance is very important too:) That's a piss-poor test for evaluating processor speed. It is a reasonable proxy for total system performance. If you want to get a feel for what processor can do for your system, try a processor-bound process. Several of the distributed clients are probably good options, as are graphic image manipulations and other raw computational tasks. Reality is often quite different. My former life was as a SAS analyst, usually on Unix boxen. SAS is a high-end data analysis, statistics, and reporting tool, used by 98% of the Fortune 500, on data sets ranging from several MB to multipble TB. I have a standard rant for people who ask for new box specs. My emphases for SAS are disk, including multiple IO channels, striping, and RAID, as appropriate, RAM, and processor. If all else is feeding smoothly, CPU will help you out. But swapping or waiting for disk I/O will trip you up far more than any incremental increase in CPU -- we're talking multiple orders of magnitude (typically 100-1000 X) rather than a fraction, or even factor, of two or so. Real-life tasks are a mix of task switching, pulling data from disk, and trying to avoid swapping active processes. -- Karsten M. Self kmself@ix.netcom.comhttp://kmself.home.netcom.com/ What part of Gestalt don't you understand? There is no K5 cabal http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ http://www.kuro5hin.org Disclaimer: http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/ pgp7gSL237T6H.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [users] i386 or PowerPc
also sprach Mike Egglestone (on Thu, 24 May 2001 07:00:44PM -0700): Which platform of hardware would be best? G4 from apple Pentium something from somewhere is that a serious question??? the pentium has nothing to say against the G4. period. moreover, CISC is just pittyful compared to RISC. then again, unless you are talking absolutely high volume, there is nothing of big computational cost that your server will do, so i'd assume a pentium would work just as fine. however, if you have the means, go for the G4! martin; (greetings from the heart of the sun.) \ echo mailto: !#^.*|tr * mailto:; [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- the micro$oft hoover: finally, a product that's supposed to suck!
Re: [users] i386 or PowerPc
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far way, someone said... is that a serious question??? the pentium has nothing to say against the G4. period. moreover, CISC is just pittyful compared to RISC. Irrelevant with today's modern CPUs like the PIII. The G3, G4, PII, PIII CPUs all take the best properties of RISC CISC. then again, unless you are talking absolutely high volume, there is nothing of big computational cost that your server will do, so i'd assume a pentium would work just as fine. however, if you have the means, go for the G4! No, go for the PIII, especially if you're going to run Linux - ix86 systems are simply better supported than powermacs. That can be a big deal if you're going to run software available only as a binary. - -- - -- Phil Brutsche [EMAIL PROTECTED] GPG fingerprint: 9BF9 D84C 37D0 4FA7 1F2D 7E5E FD94 D264 50DE 1CFC GPG key id: 50DE1CFC GPG public key: http://tux.creighton.edu/~pbrutsch/gpg-public-key.asc -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.0.4 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE7Dcy7/ZTSZFDeHPwRAgauAKChfZAYTND16YC+nZE9VHwv/g3pvACgwR1b qO9NLRrC3VOQy8eWjpSTo0w= =yS8m -END PGP SIGNATURE-
Re: [users] i386 or PowerPc
then again, unless you are talking absolutely high volume, there is nothing of big computational cost that your server will do, so i'd assume a pentium would work just as fine. however, if you have the means, go for the G4! No, go for the PIII, especially if you're going to run Linux - ix86 systems are simply better supported than powermacs. That can be a big deal if you're going to run software available only as a binary. I know it wasn't one of the listed options, but I've heard AMD's chips have had much better price/performance ratios lately, especially compared to the PIII. Cheers, Kyle
Re: [users] i386 or PowerPc
Thanks for the input guys... I took it upon myself to do some VERY basic testing... and I'll share my results if anyone's interested. The test: untarring a 88MB file full of .gifs and .html files Imac 400 Mhz 128 Ram IDE drive time= 53 seconds Celeron 700 Mhz 128 Ram IDE drive time= 80 seconds Celeron 700 Mhz 128 Ram SCSI drive time=21 seconds... Weird... seems like hard drive performance is very important too:) I'm just happy that Debian offers both platforms!! I'll probably go with whatever is less costly. thanks Mike
