On Friday 14 November 2003 10:33 pm, Cafe Admin wrote: > I'm currently running 2.5-Stable3 on a dedicated RH9 box, and I know my > hardware is being underutlized (2.0GHz Xeon , 2x10k RPM SCSI, 640MB, > 1000Mbps NIC). I'm thinking about converting the machine to Windows File > Server/PDC/SquidNT.
I can think of several reasons to reconsider: 1) Domain controllers and file servers are very critical systems - run as little additional services and software on them as possible, for both security and performance reasons. 2) Even though your CPU and RAM may be underutilized, the extra load file serving will put on your disks likely will push the throughput near/beyond the available limit, and you'll see a performance hit. 3) Have you considered Samba on Linux instead of Windows Server? Recent benchmarks (linked to from the Samba website) show Samba 3 consistently delivering over twice the throughput of Windows Server 2003 under similar loads (averaging about 2.5 times the throughput). 4) SquidNT probably doesn't deliver the same level of performance as Squid on Linux (or other Unix variants), simply because of underlying OS performance issues. My suggestion: Don't do it. Move Squid to a smaller box if you're concerned about underutilization, and use the former Squid box to run Samba to provide domain controller and file services. Adam
