Date: Mon, 5 May 1997 10:48:28 -0700 (PDT) From: Jake Hamby <jehamby@lightside.com> To: Tyson Boellstorff <tysonb@pionet.net> Cc: abial@warman.org.pl, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Subject: SMP hardware recommendations Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.3.96.970505104001.626A-100000@hamby1> In-Reply-To: <336DE306.623D@pionet.net>
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On Mon, 5 May 1997, Tyson Boellstorff wrote: > My company considers buying a new SMP machine for some > CPU/disk-intensive > tasks (similar to news server: searching and processing large quantities > of text files), and I convinced them to give a try to FreeBSD. The idea > behind it is to save some money on another Sun Ultra, if possible... I don't think I would use FreeBSD in production use on an SMP machine right now. After all, the code was only recently imported into FreeBSD-current. Of course, if you're willing to be a guinea pig.. :) If you're already using Suns, you may want to look at Solaris/Intel. It has excellent SMP support, and from an administration standpoint is identical to a Sun. UnixWare would also be a good choice for SMP. At any rate, feel free to go with FreeBSD, and if you have any reliability problems with its SMP support, you can always fall back to a commercial UNIX until they get fixed. > What hardware would you recommend? Now I'm thinking about the following > setup: > > * MB: 2xPPro 200MHz, 512kB cache, manufacturer: ???, chipset: ??? > * RAM: 256 MB (EDO ???) > * SCSI: Adaptec 2940U > * HDD: ??? (ca. 8 GB total) > * Network: Intel EtherExpress 10/100 (fxp driver) > * other hardware is less important (i.e. floppy, graphics, keyboard...) Sounds good! I believe the PPro with 512K cache is still significantly more expensive (2x) the price of the PPro w/ 256k cache, though. > And what do you think about performance of such a machine (comparing to > Sun Ultra 1/140)? I think you'll have to run your own tests to see, but a dual PPro should be faster than a single UltraSPARC. Cheers, Jake
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