Re: [Flightgear-devel] server upgrade
> > Thanks to a kind donation by an anonymous friend of the flightgear > > project we have just been able to upgrade our main ftp server [...] > Please thank the anonymous friend from me too, when opportunity arises. My thanks go to the anonymous individual also. ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] server upgrade
From: "Curtis L. Olson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Thanks to a kind donation by an anonymous friend of the flightgear > project we have just been able to upgrade our main ftp server [...] Please thank the anonymous friend from me too, when opportunity arises. ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] server upgrade
Jonathan Polley writes: > Just out of curiosity, what kind of machine would be ideal for this > purpose? Would the ideal server be consumed 100% of being a server > or could it be used to doing things such as converting terrain > information in the background? For serving things like web, ftp, mail, cvs, etc. raw speed is not so critical because you are usually talking to someone over a relatively slow pipe (end-to-end.) The few people that have blazingly fast connections to you probably aren't going to worry about it because they'll be used to talking to all the other slow web/ftp servers out there. They'll probably know you since they are probably local to have such a fast connection to you, and they'll probably give you crap about your slow servers, but you learn to live with it eventually. :-) Even fast network doesn't seem to be all that important for the general case. We run at a pretty high net load compared to anything else in the building, but we don't even come close to saturating a 10Mbit worth of bandwidth. So, having a 100Mbit net card doesn't really do a lot for most people on the other end getting served. Having enough RAM so you don't swap seems to be the important thing. What I found was that 64Mb was not nearly enough for the services I was running. The machine would go into some serious thrashing under frequently encounted un-ideal conditions. Load averages of 30-50 were not uncommon. The machine was swapping most of the time and I rarely saw the load average drop below 1.0. That's the kind of hardware you almost want to keep because it seems to be 100% bullet proof, even though it's slow ... it ran like a tank under some very daunting loads and just kept churning ahead without any complaint or glitch. I had some pretty long uptime numbers on that server. I had a 386 like that ... nothing you threw at it would make it crash. Anyway, I think the ideal hardware really depends on what you are doing. For typical web/ftp/cvs/mail tasks, I would just make sure you have enough ram to avoid swapping, and I wouldn't worry as much about raw cpu speed. Now if you start talking about dual purpose servers that also participate in world scenery builds (these servers do ...) then having a little horsepower under the hood doesn't hurt, or even a dual CPU setup would probably be useful. And since building flightgear scenery is very I/O intensive, having the biggest pipe possible to your build clients helps a lot. Also being able to read/write a lot of data quickly is also important. We currently don't have any scsi data disks on these machines because of the cost, but going scsi would be another big improvement. Generally though, there is such a wide variety of uses and needs for servers that you really have to keep track of where you are bottlenecking. And then know that if you fix that bottleneck, another bottleneck will be exposed somewhere else. You can repeat that until you run out of budget or retire or get promoted to management, etc. :-) Curt. -- Curtis Olson HumanFIRST Program FlightGear Project Twin Citiescurt 'at' me.umn.edu curt 'at' flightgear.org Minnesota http://www.menet.umn.edu/~curt http://www.flightgear.org ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] server upgrade
Just out of curiosity, what kind of machine would be ideal for this purpose? Would the ideal server be consumed 100% of being a server or could it be used to doing things such as converting terrain information in the background? On Friday, September 26, 2003, at 10:41AM, Curtis L. Olson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >Thanks to a kind donation by an anonymous friend of the flightgear >project we have just been able to upgrade our main ftp server from an >old P200 w/64Mb RAM to an AMD Athlon 900 Mhz with 256Mb RAM. It's not >exactly a new new machine, but it's a big step up, especially since >the old machine was maxed out with 4x16Mb 72pin simms. >Memory/swap/trashing was the biggest bottleneck on the old machine. > >Thanks! > >Curt. >-- >Curtis Olson HumanFIRST Program FlightGear Project >Twin Citiescurt 'at' me.umn.edu curt 'at' flightgear.org >Minnesota http://www.menet.umn.edu/~curt http://www.flightgear.org > >___ >Flightgear-devel mailing list >[EMAIL PROTECTED] >http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel > > Of COURSE they can do that. They're engineers! ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] server upgrade
"Curtis L. Olson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > Thanks to a kind donation by an anonymous friend of the flightgear > project we have just been able to upgrade our main ftp server from an > old P200 w/64Mb RAM to an AMD Athlon 900 Mhz with 256Mb RAM. It's not > exactly a new new machine, but it's a big step up, especially since > the old machine was maxed out with 4x16Mb 72pin simms. > Memory/swap/trashing was the biggest bottleneck on the old machine. That's a big jump up and should "serve" well for quite a while. Very nice! Thank you, whoever you are :-) Best, Jim ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] server upgrade
Curtis L. Olson wrote: Thanks to a kind donation by an anonymous friend of the flightgear project we have just been able to upgrade our main ftp server from an old P200 w/64Mb RAM to an AMD Athlon 900 Mhz with 256Mb RAM. It's not exactly a new new machine, but it's a big step up, especially since the old machine was maxed out with 4x16Mb 72pin simms. Memory/swap/trashing was the biggest bottleneck on the old machine. That's great news! Erik ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel