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
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