Date: Sun, 4 Jan 1998 17:45:53 +0100 From: Lukas Wunner <lukas@design.de> To: Andreas Klemm <andreas@klemm.gtn.com> Cc: Lukas Wunner <lukas@design.de>, =?iso-8859-1?Q?=22Luis_E=2E_Mu=F1oz=22?= <lem@cantv.net>, freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: [fbsd-isp] Designing for a very large ISP Message-ID: <19980104174553.57475@reactor> In-Reply-To: <19980104164912.63008@klemm.gtn.com>; from Andreas Klemm on Sun, Jan 04, 1998 at 04:49:12PM %2B0100 References: <3.0.5.32.19980103121611.007af8f0@pop.cantv.net> <19980104141146.32430@reactor> <19980104164912.63008@klemm.gtn.com>
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Howdy, > The question is, if the PCI bus performance of PPro and PII boards > is really so worse as you tell. In my opinion, if you are going to set up a serious system, you can completely forget about PentiumII based systems as they are still in customer beta-testing if you know what I mean. As for PPro based systems, I suggest you take a look at the PPro board tests in the German c't magazine and compare the PCI and memory performance they measured with the figures they measured with Pentium boards. The bottom line is that Natoma boards are actually slower wrt PCI/memory bandwidth than 430HX (Pentium) boards (forget about TX or VX boards for any serious use as they only allow up to 64MB of RAM and have extremely poor memory performance, especially the VX chipset). Now consider that we'd put say, 512MB of RAM in the PPro based system, so that's twice as much as in our Pentium based news box. If there is more real memory, there is of course also more data to be transferred between the CPU and the memory per second, but as the PPro boards' memory bandwidth is actually smaller than the Pentium boards', the memory interface will become a real bottleneck. As I said, OrionGX boards seem to be a lot better in that respect, but they are also hard to get. At least that is my experience. > 230-This machine is a P6/233 with 1GB of memory & 142GB of disk online. > 230-The operating system is FreeBSD... Any ideas which motherboard they are using and where they got it? > I think for an ISP it's crucially important to have fast connectivity > and fast routers. As an ISP, we have to offer both, IP connectivity, and the whole palette of internet services to our customers. That includes a decent news server, proxy etc pp. > then to spend too much > money in high end machines, if FreeBSD Server as a nice rack mounted > system perform excellent. Yes, we currently have quite a few of those, but with PCs, we are constantly crashing against the ceiling wrt expandability. > I personally don't believe, that buying Suns or SGI's bring you a > better server if you compare price/performance... The question is probably not price/performance, but rather if and where PC hardware is available which supports the same amount of real memory that I can put into e.g. an Origin 200 (and that has a decent memory interface). At the moment, it is a pain-you-know-where to find PC hardware which supports more than 128MB *reliably* (usually it only works with certain SIMMs and the "try and see if it runs stable" method) and which offer the same cpu<->memory bandwidth that you get with e.g. an Origin 200 (again, any recommendations for decent motherboards and a German outlet are welcome :-) ). > People are working on a FreeBSD Ultra Sparc port ;-) > Maybe this might attract you in the future ... Definitely. > But I'd really recommend, that you get a test system with a > PPro 233 MHz, 1 GB RAM, one or more 3940, one or more > Seagate Barracudas and create for the news partition a > stripe set using ccd ... It should perform nicely ;-) So which motherboard supports 1GB reliably? As for the 3940's, I'd probably prefer to put a DPT into the machine and have the controller do the striping. I don't like Adaptec anyway, but that's a different story. :-) Thanks, Lukas Wunner / seicom.NET -- lukas wunner unix, internetworking and security engineer lukas@wunner.de LW26-RIPE http://www.wunner.de/~lukas/ Funkmodems mit 2.4GHz FAQ http://www.wunner.de/~lukas/funk/
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